A corpus-based analysis of language ideologies in Hungarian school metalanguage

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to present a recently built interview corpus called Corpus of Hungarian School Metalanguage – Interview Corpus (CHSM-IC) and its potential in language ideology studies. This corpus was compiled during a broad survey on Hungarian school metalanguage carried out in 2009 and was recently made available for a wider research community within the CESAR (Central and South-East European Resources) project. The study investigates interactional routines used in metadiscourses on language use. Printed texts cited from prestigious handbooks and interview data from CHSM-IC are compared. Thus, widely used, culturally-inherited text fragments are detected and confronted with the interviewees’ narratives on their own communicational experiences. A case study on the discourse marker hát (‘so’, ‘well’) illustrates that there is a conflict and often a controversy between language ideologies disseminated by the Hungarian school system and the linguistic self-representation in the interviewees’ narratives. Combining Language Ideology, Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Discursive Social Psychology frameworks, the paper presents a detailed description on the emergence of metadiscourses in a school setting. The paper concludes that metalinguistic utterances (e.g., answers on grammaticality, statements on linguistic accuracy, etc.) and observable, spontaneous (or semi-spontaneous) language use patterns are regularly not in accordance with each other.