Anna KOLLÁTH
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Mariboru
(anna.kollath@um.si)
Keywords: Slovenia, Hungarian language, language contact, bilingual education, language and kultural diversity
It is a known fact that the Hungarian language has a special position in Central-Europe: since 1921 it has lived and still lives in eight neighbouring countries outside Hungary – the “mother country”, the total centre – usually in the shadow of the given state language among different social and economic circumstances in different statuses. The autochthonous Hungarian national community in Slovenia is six-thousand-head-strong, and the community (language) rights are provided by the constitution of the country on every level and the Hungarian language has an official status at the residence of the territorial minority (regional official language).
The lecture drafts the most decisive elements of the language situation in the Pomurje region and the basic segments of the minority Hungarian language and the Slovene state language as the live next to each other and with each other. It summarises the most important station of the research of the non-dominant Hungarian language variant with a special focus of the recent research tendencies (European, bilateral and national projects, research network activities, individual and group scientific works). It shows the trends of the bilingual language use, the manifestations of functional bilingualism, the vitality of the minority mother tongue in the visible and hearable context of bilingualism.
As the education in the mother tongue and about the mother tongue is the basic criteria of staying in the language, the bilingual education model and its operation in the Pomurje region, as well as those innovations which serve the expansion of the use areas of the Hungarian contact variant in the Pomurje region, the development of the Hungarian vocational language, the strengthening of the contents of the Hungarian identity and the support of language and cultural diversity are given a special importance in the lecture.