Regional Dialect Use in School and Teachers in Southeast Hungary

Abstract This paper is part of a larger ongoing research project titled Patterns of Language Regard in the City of Szeged, Hungary and Its Vicinity: A Study in Perceptual Dialectology . The data were collected in the research site in southeastern Hungary, in Szeged, Hódmezővásárhely, and Balástya, through sociolinguistic interviews with ten teachers at each site. The paper focuses on one aspect of the relationship between regional dialect and education: teachers’ attitudes toward the use of regional dialects during classroom interaction. The central question is how primary and lower secondary school teachers perceive the role of dialectal speech—both their own and their students’—in formal classroom settings. Attitudes toward regional dialects— whether negative or tolerant—do not vary significantly according to the location of the school (village, town, or city), but reflect the individual teachers’ personalities. Some tolerate their students’ regional dialect while others correct non-standard language use.