“Transylvanian Hunglish” Phonological Properties of Hungarian Accented English in Transylvania

Abstract

Hunglish is a term for Hungarian native speakers’ English pronunciation. It is a well recognisable and quite homogeneous accent, which is thoroughly described in the literature of second language acquisition. However, this paper proposes that Hungarian speakers living in Romania use a phonologically different Hunglish compared to those living in Hungary. The study is built on direct speech recordings made with 30 Hungarian speakers descending from various parts of Transylvania. Their accent is confronted with the pronunciation of 15 speakers from Hungary, who participated in the same reading experiment. Results indicate that the English pronunciation of the two groups mostly share the same phonetic and phonological features. Only a few persistent phonological differences can be identified; for instance, English open back vowels [ʌ, ɒ, ɑ] are replaced with Hungarian [ɒ] by the Transylvanian informants, and with [a] by the speakers from Hungary; Transylvanian informants preserve more English schwas and diphthongs due to their L2 Romanian, etc. The differences basically originate in the fact that Transylvanian speakers’ interlanguage is much more heterogeneous than that of Hungarians’, i.e. Transylvanians speak a substandard version of Hungarian as L1, they speak a Transylvanian dialect, they speak Romanian at high level as L2, and they usually speak further foreign languages as well beyond English; these varieties all affect their foreign accent. The paper takes account of the most important characteristics of Transylvanian Hunglish, with a synchronic phono-logical analysis, and a contrastive analysis with the general phonological properties of Hunglish found in the literature.