Two Relative Contact Phenomena in the Language use of Hungarians in Transylvania

The paper discusses two peculiarities of language use generally taken to be relative contact phenomena in case of Hungarian in bilingual, non-dominant context: the preference of analytical linguistic variants and non-standard plural forms. The data come from two sociolinguistic surveys conducted in Transylvania (in 1996 and 2009). The surveys were carried out with the participation of a representative sample of speakers. The 1996 survey was conducted with a quota sample (N = 216 in Romania and N = 107 in Hungary) and the 2009 sample with a representative sample (N = 4058 in Romania). The hypothesis that Romanian-dominant bilingual speakers tend to exhibit relative contact phenomena to a larger extent was supported with respect to these two issues. The results show that the occurrence of these phenomena is determined both by the language competence of the dominant language and by the regional characteristics of the bilingualism. The results confirm the possibility that the spoken-language properties under discussion are relative contact phenomena.