GENERATION GAP IN REGIONAL DIALECT USE: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

This presentation discusses a two-generation interview carried out within the Szeged Sociolinguistics Research project, whose text was included in the Kontra et al. (2016) volume, but was not analyzed there. The interviewees are a 42-year-old woman and her 12-year-old daughter, who live in the same household in Szeged. The most striking characteristic of their language use from the dialectological point of view is that the mother consistently uses the Szeged dialect throughout the interview while her daughter does not use it at all. The daughter’s language use is especially interesting if we consider the fact that both her grandparents and parents use the dialect in their three-generational household, including their communications with her. I analyze the following aspects of the two-generation interview: (i) what mother and daughter think regarding the regional dialect vs. the standard, (ii) what they think regarding the other one’s language use, and (iii) what they think the reasons are for the other one’s language use. This case study may shed light on certain aspects of the workings of intergenerational discontinuity of language use at the level of the smallest speech community, the family.