The Language of Authenticity in Hungarian–Hungarian Encounters

The study of authenticity in sociolinguistics has questioned the notion of the authentic speaker or previous interpretations of place, and it rather focuses on how the social functioning of authenticity is “mediated by and expressed through language” (Lacoste et al. 2014: 4) in different socio-cultural contexts. In linguistic ethnography, the researcher’s positionality also becomes subject to analysis, especially when this has a direct influence on the data obtained. Through the excerpts from interviews conducted at a festival, I aim to discuss the sociolinguistic features of authenticity in the context of the Hungarian–Hungarian encounters. Moreover, the cultural values attributed to the different ways of speaking the Hungarian language are also articulated in these interviews.