Personal Notes on Hungarian American Bilingualism Research

Abstract

In 1967, linguist John Lotz, born in Milwaukee but raised mostly in Hungary, called attention to the lack of research on Hungarian American bilingualism at a time when monographs and PhD dissertations described, in great detail, the bilingualism of Norwegian, Greek, Polish, and Finnish people in the US. When I became an associate instructor of Hungarian at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1978, I embarked on The Project on Hungarian American Bilingualism in South Bend, Indiana. As a result, eighty hours of Hungarian speech and sixty hours of English were recorded, and a book appeared in Hungarian in 1990. Not much later, in 1995, I was involved with the publication of Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region, compiled and written by Andrew Vázsonyi. The personal reflections comprising this article will deal with some important issues concerning fieldwork in South Bend and will offer a brief characterization of the differences between Hungarian American bilingualism in the 1970s and today. kontram@gmail.com