Education paper by Fehér, Krisztina
University of Debrecen

Heritage Language Transmission in the American Hungarian Diaspora – Results of an Online Survey (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In order to gain insights in what factors play a role in language maintenance in a diaspora, it is crucial to investigate heritage language transmission during first language acquisition. Previous linguistic research has focused on adults in American Hungarian communities, while less attention has been paid to parent-child communication in the Hungarian diaspora in the U.S. A survey has been launched online to fill this research gap.
Parents of children of Hungarian heritage (ages 3-18) have been invited to complete the survey. All participants reside in the U.S. and no knowledge of Hungarian is required for the completion of the survey. The bilingual survey mainly includes multiple-choice questions and Likert-type scales to gain quantitative data on the potential factors behind heritage language maintenance. The survey also contains some open-ended questions to gather qualitative data on the American variety of Hungarian as it is used by the Hungarian-speaking parents and their children. The questionnaire has four parts: 1) parents’ linguistic background, language usage and linguistic beliefs, 2) children’s language usage, 3) characteristics of the parent-child communication, 4) parents’ attitudes towards the local and homeland varieties of Hungarian, as well as towards bilingualism and bilingual language acquisition in the diaspora.
224 submissions have been received to date, but the survey is still open and collecting responses (see at https://forms.gle/DRQdRFWfbrvke5oe6). The talk will present the preliminary results of the survey in progress.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Krisztina Fehér is an assistant professor at the Department of Hungarian Linguistics, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her research interests are child language, bilingualism and bidialectism. She has published numerous journal articles in the fields of socio- and psycholinguistics. She earned her Ph.D. in 2012 in Hungarian Linguistics. She is the author of three recent books on linguistic methodology (2016), the phonology of child language (2017), and cognitive grammar (2018).