Sense of local identity, attitudes toward dialects and language teaching: The Hungarian minority in Serbia

Abstract

AbstractA large body of academic literature (e.g. Fishman 1977, 1999; Giles and Johnson 1981; Romaine 2000, among others) claims that language is one of the most significant markers of ethnic identification and that it plays a crucial role not only in the external perception of an ethnic group by outsiders but also in the selfidentification of an ethnic group. In a minority environment, sense of ethnic identity and language retention are connected very tightly, which is why it is of extreme importance to study attitudes towards the dialects of a language and value judgments about them. The paper presents the results of a research into attitudes toward dialects, conducted with approximately three hundred 5th and 8th grade pupils (age 12 and 15, respectively) attending school in Hungarian in two regions of Vojvodina, Serbia. It explores the subjects’ local features of identity, given that the research was conducted in eight different localities. The results of the research serve as a sound basis for developing use-centered, functional-situational mother tongue education of Hungarian minority pupils living in Serbia, since the current curriculum completely disregards the language varieties of many Hungarian minority pupils brought up and living in rural areas, who acquire and use the dialect spoken in the family.