Attitudes of the Hungarian-American Diaspora to the Officialization of English in the United States

Abstract

The paper examines the attitudes and opinions of the representatives of Hungarian-American communities in the United States regarding the officialization of English at the federal level. The corpora of the analysis have been built with the help of a) the websites of Hungarian-American organizations in the United States; b) the legislative database of the US Federal Congress; and the digitized versions of the printed newspapers and magazines published in Hungarian in the United States. The method of classifying the attitude patterns relies on Terrence G. Wiley’s language policy classification spectrum (1999) and on Richard Ruíz’s classic “orientations in language planning” framework (1984), expanded by Hult and Hornberger (2016). The results indicate that while Hungarian-Americans have mostly been trying to maintain their first language (in the private domain), they have also embraced English and willingly assimilated into American society, resenting the alleged ethnolinguistic separatism of Hispanic Americans and their demands for special minority-language accommodations.