Three Sociolinguistic Methods of Testing Language Attitudes towards Hungarian Dialects (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
The paper discusses three different ways of investigating language attitudes towards Hungarian dialects to illustrate what a sociolinguist can do during a pandemic. The first study presents Hungarian villagers’ attitudes by analyzing the enormous archive of the ‘New General Atlas of Hungarian’ project (2007-2012). Data from 197 interviews are built in a corpus and were used to test hypotheses such as: The speakers have negative experiences due to their dialect speech. Nonetheless, they are not ashamed of it. Those who are aware of their dialect background are more tolerant of other regions’ characteristics than those speakers who consider themselves as users of the standard. A second possibility for replacing fieldwork during a lockdown is collecting data online. This study investigates dialect features and the attitudes towards them in social media. Hundreds of random data warn of the presence of prejudice and prescriptive viewpoint that still characterizes mother tongue education in Hungary. The third study used an online survey that was designed for Hungarian voice actors with the cooperation of their labor union to explore their language attitudes. 69 responses were received, which allowed insight into the process of dubbing and reveal some factors that sometimes lead to a lower quality of Hungarian sound track. All three studies were conducted by the presenter, and they were supported by the Bolyai János Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and by the ÚNKP-21-5 National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrea Parapatics is a sociolinguist who is an associate professor at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. Her main research areas are language attitudes towards regional dialects and teaching methodology. She has published a monograph, two exercise books, a slang dictionary, and numerous articles. She is a founding editor of the journal Anyanyelv-pedagógia. In the frame of the Bolyai János Research Grant, she is currently working on the analysis of the sociolinguistic interviews of the ‘New General Atlas of Hungarian’, a former project of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and ELTE.