Based on an ethnographic study of educational activities for language revitalisation aiming at teaching Hungarian to children in North-East Romania, I argue that the practice of education can be better understood by invoking the perspectives of local speakers than by enacting the concept of named languages.
Current sociolinguistics has been engaged with the reconceptualisation of named languages, their borders and subordinated categories, such as standards and dialects, in order to highlight the heterogeneity, fluidity and socio-culturally and historically embedded inventedness of these concepts (García and Li 2014, Creese and Blackledge, eds. 2018). These efforts have potential benefits for minority language education, contributing to its transformative power to change language-based hierarchies. Attempts to achieve a conceptual reassessment, however, rarely have been applied to classroom interaction, where contested languages are involved in the everyday practice of education. Our earlier research of a stigmatised and often debated 'language' indicated that its exogeneous and endogeneous naming practices are quite different; it is labelled as the "Moldavian Csángó Hungarian dialect" in Hungary and as a "mixture" of Romanian and Hungarian by the Romanian majority in this region of North-East Romania. More importantly, local speakers regard "the way we speak" to be neither Hungarian, nor Romanian. Based on the ethnographic study of educational activities within a language revitalisation programme, aiming to teach Hungarian to Moldavian children, I will argue that the practice of education can be better understood by invoking the perspectives of local social actors than by enacting the concept of named languages. This understanding of minority language education can lead to a classroom, where students do not learn a contested language, but are involved in finding new ways of speaking, which might help them take up and inhabit new perspectives. References García, Ofelia and Li Wei 2014. Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, U.K. Creese, Angela and Adrian Blackledge, eds. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity. Routledge, New York.
