Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
and may not have acquired a new German identity due to the German community.
In some cases they do not speak the language of their parents as a MT, nor do they
speak that of their host country. This phenomenon is labelled as semi-lingualism
(Tickoo 1995: 323, 325).
Now this is a linguistically based tragedy for many would-be workers who
are eliminated from the waiting list because of their deficient competence and
practice of the new language (accompanied by their cultural differences).
A last remark on the newcomers (be they temporary or permanent residents):
they will not find a job at the level where the job would be in their original
country (I mean social, not economic level). The margin of their original and
their new social level (level of employment) can be determined by their linguistic
level in the host country, and their cultural level as accepted by the host country.
Many of them may end up as ‘déclassés’ in the host country mostly because of
linguistic reasons.
Catching up in the new country
Let us stay with immigrants and migrant workers: they may display theoretically
almost the same problems as one could find within the majority, but in practice
they shine more intensely in the same local fires due to the continuous incendiarism
they are suffering in the host country.
Let us take an exceptional case: that of migrant workers coming from the
former colonies, who do have a certain knowledge of the idiom of their host
country. (Here I do not refer to academics; in many cases they have an excellent
command of the idiom of their host country.) This language is, after all, not an
alien idiom for them, but a second language (acquired in their original context).
Do they succeed or not? I do not know. My hypothesis is that the knowledge
of the language of the host country is not decisive in itself. Other factors
may be equally important, like the overall intellectual level, or the dynamic character
of the personality which enables a person to attain new goals.
These features are – ceteris paribus – more linked to their cultural level in
their original setting, than to the knowledge of the language of the host country:
that is to say, to their competence in their MT.
Mother tongue competence and profession
There is a correspondence between the level of schooling, the level of MT
achievement, and the level of employment (and in many cases the socio-geographical
setting of the individual).
I now wish to offer (in a detailed form) some data on literacy in Hungary.
The research was conducted in the Research Center of Mass Communication between
1984–86 (Terestyéni 1987), i.e. immediately before the lecture I presented.
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