Kontra, Miklós and Anna Borbély, eds. 2021. Tanulmányok a budapesti beszédről - a Budapesti Szociolingvisztikai Interjú alapján ('Studies on Budapest speech based on the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview'). Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó.

Abstract

Edited by the leading Hungarian linguists Miklós Kontra and Anna Borbély, Tanulmányok a budapesti beszédről is a collection of articles written between 1989 and 2021 as part of the Budapesti Szociolingvisztikai Interjú ['Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview'] or BUSZI project. This project was ongoing between 1985 and 2010 in the Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences or MTA and led by Miklós Kontra. (The project continued for a few years even after 2010, although in a more limited scope, led by Tamás Váradi.) The volume contains both newly written articles, such as the one by Miklós Kontra on the history of the project, and republished older ones, at times with additions and modifications to their original versions. The book consists of two large parts: the first part contains introductory articles that contextualize the project itself, and the second consists of several individual studies that concentrate each on a specific topic within the BUSZI project. As Kontra highlights in his historical overview in Chapter 2, the main aims of the BUSZI project were to complement the written corpora and the intuition-based studies that until then were the norm in research about Hungarian language use in Budapest. The new project was to rely on a relatively large speech corpus, thus enabling sociolinguists to compare the language uses of various social classes living in Budapest as well as to investigate speech styles, meaning the degree and kind of attention that speakers pay to the way they talk. The project also aimed to secure comparability with possible future phenomena and investigations, although to-date, thirtyfive years since the beginning of the project, no such comparative investigations were carried out. In accordance with these rather ambitious aims, the project has practically covered the entire spectrum of the structure of language, ranging from phonetics and phonology through morphology, syntax, and lexis, all the way to stylistic and discourse features. Accordingly, the book is itself structured along the two concerns of contextualization and focused analyses promised by its division into these two large parts. It is important to clarify in connection with the research methods applied throughout the BUSZI project that the investigations were largely built upon Labovian foundations, with the interviews being adapted versions of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic interview tailored to a