Language and Literature paper by Forintos, Éva
University of Pannonia

Parallel Processes in Canadian/American-Hungarian Language Contact Situation

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Languages in contact are the outcome of the people in contact and the consequence of communities of people of dissimilar language surroundings in contact. Language contact is a multidisciplinary, multidimensional field in which mutual effects control the comprehension of how and why people use the languages they do. In language contact research there is an interrelationship between language systems, social and communicative factors and psycholinguistic processing (Clyne 2003). The focus of the present paper is on the dynamics of the language systems in contact, i.e. to see how bilinguals make their languages more synonymous/similar (convergence) and how these languages are distinguished in certain aspects (divergence). In other words, attention is paid to how the language systems converge, and how and to what degree material from one language is integrated into the other. The two languages involved are genealogically non-related and structural-typologically non-identical languages.
This paper considers aspects of language contact on the basis of data across dyads in an environment of English language dominance where the Hungarian community is of a minority. The research employs the corpus of written language samples taken from the Hungarian community’s newspaper titled Kanadai Magyarság, which is the largest Hungarian weekly in the Western World.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Forintos, Éva is an associate professor at the English and American Studies Institute of the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary lecturing in linguistics, applied linguistics and contactlinguistics. She has carried out the contactlinguistic study of the language of the Hungarian community in Australia. She has published a number of articles focusing on different linguistic aspects of English-Hungarian language contact situations as well as the language use of Hungarian communities in different domains.