Agency and ideology in language maintenance: Hungarian immigrants’ narratives on assimilationist post-war Australia

ABSTRACT

This study explored stories of intergenerational language maintenance narrated by first- generation Hungarian immigrants in Australia. It sought an understanding of Hungarian immigrants’ positioning vis-à-vis their language ecology during the assimilationist post-war era of Australia. The narratives reveal that some families accepted the monolingual norms of using English in public spaces and gave in to the pressures of homogenising schools. However, in some families, agency was deployed to resist these normalising monolingual ideologies. These families had stronger intergenerational language maintenance of Hungarian. The findings of this research contribute to our understanding of the interactions between external factors (such as policy), and the subjective factors such as the individuals’ agency in managing language use in immigrant contexts. The study discusses the way ideologies were shaped and negotiated and highlights the benefits of using linguistic narratives to reveal variability within seemingly homogenous communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Language maintenance and shift
• agency
• ideology
• family language planning
• Hungarians in Australia
• linguistic life histories
• narratives

Acknowledgement

This study was conducted in Sydney in 2015 over 12 months. I would like to thank the participants who gave their time to sit for the interviews and the various Hungarian community organisations which assisted with locating potential participants. I am also grateful for the funding provided by UNSW to carry out this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Wog is a slang term to refer to immigrants. This was widely used in the post-war era.

2 David Jones is a large department store chain in Australia targeting middle and upper classes.

3 This respondent came from Jewish Hungarian background. In Sydney, there is a significant Jewish speaking Hungarian community.

4 Spoken with animated voice.

5 ‘Tessék’ is the equivalent of Please-IMP, used in more formal situations.

6 ‘Nagy magyar’ literally means ‘big Hungarian’ and refers to someone who maintains a strong Hungarian identity.

7 Lexical loan from English ‘force’. Standard Hungarian verb is ‘forszíroz’. There were several examples of lexical loans which are not discussed in this paper.