The sociolinguistic survey of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project and its partial results

Abstract

The paper presents the most overall project of Hungarian dialectology of the past few decades and deals with the partial result of its sociolinguistic survey. The interviews analysed were recorded in Western Hungary as part of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project between 2007 and 2012. The project, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and organized by the Geolinguistics Research Group of the Eötvös Loránd University, asked the participants about sociolinguistic issues at several data collection sites in the Hungarian language area, in addition to surveying dialectological phenomena. For example: Do you speak dialects here in this town? Do they speak better here than in the neighboring settlements? Do you speak in the same way in a city or official place as at home, in a family circle? Have you ever been mocked because of your dialect speech? Given that tens of thousands of hours of the recordings have not yet been processed in a systematic and comprehensive way, the first half of the study provides numerical and detailed data on how the planned program of the research group was realized in practice regarding, for the time being, the Western Hungarian data collection sites. The second half of the study presents partial results on the language and dialect awareness, attitudes and use of the respondents by analysing the sociolinguistic interviews recorded in this area. The study provides a more accurate description of the specifics in the archive of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project, as well as what the recorded data reveal on the linguistic mentality of the Western Hungarian speech community in the beginning of the 21 st century. This is just one of the numerous research topics offered by the enormous archive.