Australian-Hungarian Language Contact Phenomena

Abstract

This paper is one abstract of a large-scale study that investigates how the written language (Hungarian) of a minority group (LI) functions outside its traditional setting in central Europe, in an environment where another language (L2) is used (English in Australia). This is an intraregional language contact situation where Hungarian immigrants live among the English-speaking population of Australia; and the two languages involved are genealogically non-related and structural-typologically non-identical languages. The aim of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, to give an overview of ore of “the most debated and still debatable problems contact linguistics is facing: e.g., the dynamism of penetrability of the results of linguistic interference into the morphological level of the receptor-language” (Rot 1991:49) and to find out if the applicability of the findings of language contact scholarly literature can be justified in the case of the current corpus, e.g., Australian-Hungarian (AuH) corpus. The other aim is to carry out morphological research on the written data in order to see whether the derivational blends (e.g., English loanwords with Hungarian derivational suffixes, e.g., derived adjectives derived from nouns in the word formation process) are formed according to the derivational rules of the Hungarian or the English language. Since the language of the examined newspaper is dominantly Hungarian, the most important hypothesis of my study is that the selection is governed by Hungarian derivational rules.

In conducting the linguistic analysis of the corpus, a general purpose software application — a concordancing program — has been used.