In the case of a contested language, there is often disagreement over the naming of the vernacular. I analyze language portraits by pupils participating minority language education to explore how they label different languages at school. The naming practices of such pupils seem to display less fixed categories than usual.
According to Pennycook and Makoni (2006), a key moment in inventing a language is the naming of a language. In cases of so-called contested languages, there is disagreement among activists and speakers whether a vernacular is a separate language, a dialect or something else. I investigate the case of teaching Hungarian in Moldavia (Romania). There Hungarian is taught in otherwise Romanian medium education for the so-called Moldavian Csángós, whose parents speak in the "Csángó mode/way" (a special Hungarian related vernacular, see Bodó & Fazakas 2018). I have collected language portraits from such pupils in several schools in Moldavia. In this paper, I analyze the ways the pupils label different languages, including their local vernacular. An important feature of the language portraits is that they were produced in an educational context. The school environment was significant in the way the pupils interpreted the instructions to list and mark all their languages (they often understood it as the languages at school) and on the expressions used (e.g. the participants used the medium of education at school, Romanian). However, there is a lot of variation in the corpus. The naming practices included also different variations of the label "Csángó", which I will analyze in more detail. As a conclusion, I argue that the naming practices of the pupils from a contested language minority display less fixed categories than those typical for European school children. Bodó & Fazakas 2018. Enregistering authenticity in language revitalization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22/5: 570–594. Pennycook & Makoni 2006. Disinventing and Reconstructing Languages. Multilingual Matters.
