Language Attitudes and Use Among Hungarians in North Carolina

The connection between the attitudes held by a bilingual toward each of his or her languages and his or her use of those languages has been studied for many years, often in connection with the framework of ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) first set forth by Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor (1977). These types of studies generally focus more on immigrant bilingual communities outside the United States than on those within it, and even less so on non-Hispanic communities in the United States. This study focuses on language attitude and use surveys completed by a relatively small immigrant community comprising members of the Hungarian Clubs of the Raleigh-Durham area and Elkin, NC. The surveys included forty Likert-type statements concerning participants’ attitudes toward Hungarian and American cultures and languages, as well as thirty-eight categories of usage within different domains and with different interlocutors for which participants responded regarding use of Hungarian, English, and mixed codes. Several statement clusters were formed regarding identification with each culture and language as well as regarding their use in order to examine patterns. Seventy-five surveys were collected over the course of a year from first- and second-generation participants ages 8 to 82, from all levels of education