Volume 35, Issue 1 -

From the early twentieth century to the present day, Transcarpathia has belonged to several states: the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, the Hungarian Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and finally to Ukraine. The status of what counts as a minority and a majority language has changed each time the state affiliation has been changed. Based on the long term research by Csernicskó, and on the one-month fieldwork carried out by Laihonen in 2012, our goal is to provide an autonomous critical account and discourse analysis of the linguistic situation in Transcarpathia. We draw examples especially from the linguistic landscape, which documents the hybrid practices difficult to catch with other means. Different nation states have aimed to evaluate certain languages over others. However, Transcarpathia has been too far away from different national centers and it has therefore remained a periphery. In the everyday life of Transcarpathians, ironies around language repertoires, standardization and heteroglossia come into the fore, especially in the current context. Such unexpected linguistic practices or “pre-nationalist” and “non-purist” ideologies offer a change to see how certain categories, such as language, have remained in their hybrid forms and are still clearly “in the making”.

This article is a contribution to the hitherto scant literature on learning a historical minority language and on language ideologies in the context of a study abroad program in Hungary, Debrecen. I analyse the language ideologies of the decision makers in Hungary and in the Debrecen Summer School in relation to the teaching of Hungarian to the neighboring peoples. Drawing on interactional data of participants from Romania, the perspective of learning Hungarian as a historical minority language is examined. The present article combines a historical approach with language ideologies by focusing on an institution offering language education. Language ideologies are presented as they appear in the larger historical discourses, contemporary documents, and media interviews. I briefly outline the major turning points in the history of the institution which also reflects the changing language ideologies and cultural politics of Hungary. The qualitative discourse analysis of interviews and the conclusion of this ethnographic study demonstrate that language ideological positions in relation to the teaching and learning of Hungarian have been firmly located in historical and cultural contexts. Discourse analysis of various data demonstrates that, on the one hand, the course providers have espoused competing ideologies of who the learners should be as well as how to present the country and the culture, while, on the other hand, showing that the learners have had to negotiate prejudice and stereotype rooted in discourses about the often burdened history.

Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and, more specifically, on the relationship between the macro-level of dominant discourses and the micro-level of individual positionings, we examine the way linguistic identities are constructed by immigrant students of Albanian origin in Greece. We elaborate on two ‘competitive’ discourses: the national, homogenizing one and the post-national, deconstructing one, and the way they influence the construction of immigrant students’ linguistic identities. Our data come from lyceum immigrant students’ essays which are analyzed in order to trace their positionings towards the two ‘competitive’ discourses, and in particular, towards the linguistic dimension of these discourses. For a systematic investigation of immigrant students’ linguistic identities we employ the membership categorization device living populations in Greece which includes the categories immigrant people and majority people as a standardized relational pair. We focus on the category-bound predicates of the category immigrant people and particularly on those related to the knowledge of the majority language. Our main finding is that the immigrant students of Albanian origin in our data are positively positioned towards the national, homogenizing discourse and particularly towards Greek monolingualism, thus looking forward to the social benefits of speaking Greek.

In this field note we discuss findings from pilot research on a variety of heritage German spoken in the Northeastern Province of Misiones of Argentina. Based on sociolinguistic field interviews with 25 consultants possessing varying degrees of proficiency in the language, we show that this variant of heritage German does in fact occasionally display instances of both null subjects (e.g. pro -drop) and null objects. These preliminary findings are consistent with other recent studies in the contact linguistics literature (cf. Camacho et al. 1997; Sánchez 1997, 1999a, 1999b; Cuza et al. 2013). In conclusion, we introduce suggestions for future research.