“Ez a legstickybb glue” – Patterns of Language Use in the Classrooms of Hungarian Heritage Schools in the Cleveland Area

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Previous research on Hungarian Americans’ language has so far focused on adults, while much less attention has been paid to children and to teacher-child communication in a heritage-school setting. Although there has been a large close-knit Hungarian community in the Cleveland area whose members have passed on their heritage language to their children throughout generations, there have been no linguistic studies conducted in that community.

To address the gaps above, Hungarian heritage schools in the Cleveland area were invited to participate in a research project. As part of a concise linguistic study, class observations have been conducted since the end of October 2023 in eight classes in two schools. The aim was to determine the patterns of language use, the attitudes towards the Hungarian language, the characteristics of the local variety of Hungarian as well as the triggers for specific linguistic choices.Language-related field notes have been taken on the classroom activities of 42 students between the ages of 6-17 and on that of their teachers. While in the classroom, the field worker has taken notes on code switching/mixing, translanguaging, language maintenance/attrition, subjective reactions to linguistic phenomena and on the linguistic landscape. The research project is still on-going. To date, a total of 28 hours of classroom observation resulted in a 14400-word corpus of field notes. The findings of a qualitative analysis of the data collected by the time of the conference will be presented.


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 earned her Ph.D. in 2012 in Hungarian Linguistics. She is the author of three books on linguistic methodology (2016), the phonology of child language (2017), and cognitive grammar (2018). Currently she is an MFA Visiting Lecturer at the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Cleveland State University, Cleveland OH, USA. She instructs Hungarian language courses in the Hungarian Program and linguistics courses in the Linguistics Program.