Zsuzsanna Gaál
University
of Szeged
(zgaal@jgypk.u-szeged.hu)
In the case of ethnic minorities, schooling in the mother tongue and teaching the mother tongue have a special role in the objective presentation and raising of awareness of linguistic characteristics resulting from contacts between the mother tongue and the official language. Teachers of the Hungarian language play an important role in forming opinions or attitudes about languages, language variations and bilingualism, since it is teachers who shape future generations’ attitudes towards languages. It is of utmost importance that students who are to be teachers of Hungarian should be aware of the significance of attitudes to languages. For university education to be successful, it is inevitable to explore how far the attitudes of students are influenced by attitudes resulting from misconceptions about language, so that these false beliefs could be refuted by professional arguments during their studies.
This study is based on research made in Nitra, in the research field of Hungarian– Slovakian bilingualism. The present paper focuses on the language attitudes among students from Vojvodina. The subjects of the study fulfilled the following selection criteria: their mother tongue is Hungarian, they live and study at the University Novi Sad, they are bilingual, and they are studying to become primary school teachers in grades 1 to 6. In my presentation I show how bilingual students feel about both the Hungarian and the Serbian language, the specificities and contacts of the two languages and characteristics of bilingual language and code-switching. I draw attention to the lessons learnt from the subjective language data.