The interdependencies of bilingual behaviour. Psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic profile of Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals

Affiliations

Faculty of Economic and Human Sciences, Sapientia University, Piața Libertății 1, 530104 Miercurea Ciuc, Romania

History

Received March 6, 2015
Accepted April 30, 2015
Published July 17, 2015

Key words

Romanian as a non-native language
bilingualism
linguistic interference
language contact
verbal behaviour

Abstract

This paper presents the specific features of a school population in Romania for whom Romanian is a non-native language, their mother tongue being Hungarian. The first part of the study offers a description of the main characteristics of the verbal behaviour of this bilingual population. The first subheading will discuss, on the one hand, the linguistic profile of the subjects (linguistic interference, linguistic pseudo-creativity etc.) and, on the other hand, it will present the main aspects of the socio-affective dimension of verbal behaviour (such as communicational anguish, displacement of communicational intention, linguistic code switching etc.). Practically, these features can be followed in the case of other bi(multi)lingual speakers as well. The second part of the paper presents certain lexical and semantic interference and vocabulary activating habits in the case of bilingual persons, relating them to the linguistic context and the linguistic landscape.

The formulated data and observations represent a synthesis of empirical research carried out between 2000–2013 through different methods, such as: observation, case studies (within the context of the data referring to the profile of language behaviour), structured interviews and questionnaires (employed in the study of the linguistic landscape). The main aim of this study is to offer a socio- and psycholinguistic profile of Hungarian-Romanian bilingualism set in a holistic context.

Copyright

© 2015 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.