Terminology and language planning for Hungarian spoken in Romania

 

Attila BENŐ

(attilabe@yahoo.com)

In my paper I present the problems of specialized languages in case of Hungarian used in Romania. I focus on problems of administrative, legislative and educational specialized languages in Hungarian spoken in Romania, as well as on the language planning tasks for that special special situation in the context of asymmetrical bilingualism and limited possibilities of mother tongue usage. As it is well known, different variants of a specialized language should be unitary as much as possible. But in case of Hungarian used in Romania certain administrative and legislative notions have no meaning equivalent in the standard variant of Hungarian. For example, terms referring to the prefect and the prefect’s institution (the representative of the Government at local level) or to other national-specific institutions – are used inconsistently in Hungarian. Thus special corpus planning tasks are to be carried out in order to manage these language problems. For almost 20 years “Szabó T. Attila” Linguistic Institute” (from Cluj/Kolozsvár) has managed specific language problems for Hungarian in Romania. In my lecture I present some of the major problems as well as the possible solutions. The lessons of solving specialized language problems in minority context might be useful for other pluricentric languages.