Contact phenomena in the use of personal names by Slovakia Hungarians

János BAUKO
Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra
(jbauko@ukf.sk)

Keywords: Slovakia Hungarians, Hungarian language, bilingualism, official and non-official personal names, name contact

The Hungarian language belongs to pluricentric languages (Lanstyák 1995, 1996; Kenesei 2006; Kontra 2011), the non-dominant varieties of which are also used in the states where the Hungarians live as national minorities. The language use and the use of proper names by minority Hungarians differ from those of the Hungarians living in Hungary (Bauko 2015; Lanstyák–Szabómihály eds. 2011). The name use by the Hungarians living as national minorities in the Carpathian Basin is characterized by a bilingual proper name use because they use the names not only in their minority language (mother tongue) form but also in their majority language (state language) form. As a consequence of the contact between the state language and the minority language, the contact phenomena appear in the treasury of proper names.

The paper discusses contact phenomena in the use of personal names of the Hungarians living in Slovakia. The Slovakia Hungarians are able to use the Hungarian and Slovak proper name forms in accordance with the given communication situation, however, Slovak name forms might appear in the Hungarian-speaking context, while the Slovak-speaking context might include Hungarian name forms. Code-switching in proper name usage can be observed both in writing and in speech.

References

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Kenesei, István 2006. Hungarian as a Pluricentric Language.

http://www.efnil.org/conferences/archives/madrid-2006/papers/07-EFNIL-Madrid-Kenesei.pdf

Kontra, Miklós 2011. Language Contact Issues in Central Europe. In: Language, Communication, Information. I. Koutny – P. Nowak (eds.), 45–61.

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