Abstract:

The majority of Hungarian-speaking children come to school from a dialect environment and are first confronted with the fact that the language version learned at home can only be used to a certain extent. During the presentation, as part of a larger research, the attitudes of Hungarian secondary school students in Slovakia regarding regional language varieties will be presented. The purpose of the research is to assess the attitudes of Hungarian vocational secondary school and secondary grammar school students in Slovakia regarding dialects in a formal speaking situation, to assess the differences in students' attitudes between the types of educational institutions, and to examine the changes in students' attitudes during the educational process. The results provide an answer to the question of the extent to which students studying in vocational secondary schools and secondary grammar schools are receptive to the individual Hungarian regional language variants in Slovakia, as well as to how the students' opinions develop during the educational process. The results are presented according to educational institutions and broken down into grades. 793 students from 13 Slovak educational institutions from 281 settlements were involved in the research, which took place between May and October 2022 using personally filled out questionnaires. During the survey, the students listened to three audio recordings made with informants living in the 3 Hungarian dialect regions of Slovakia. The audio recordings made in a formal situation come from the news summaries of Slovak Radio and Television in Hungarian language. In a minority speaking community, the future of the mother tongue may depend on the language and dialect attitudes of the language users, as in many cases the dialect is the only language variety they know.

Keywords:

Dialect, Hungarian language, Slovakia, secondary schools.