Programme title: Practical Implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in Ukraine (Transcarpathia)
Year: 2021
Brief description: Ukraine ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1999. However, the ratification law was never implemented in practice, as it was never deposited with the Secretary General of the Council of Europe: the Constitutional Court annulled the ratification law on procedural grounds. In 2003, Ukraine ratified the Charter again (Law No. 802-IV). The instrument of ratification was deposited with the Secretary General of the Council of Europe on 19 September 2005, and the Charter entered into force on 1 January 2006. In summer 2012, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Law of Ukraine “On the Principles of State Language Policy”, which—partly with reference to the Charter—changed the legal framework governing the use of regional or minority languages, including in Transcarpathia.
The research programme examined how Ukraine’s international commitments are implemented in practice with regard to the regional or minority languages of Transcarpathia (Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and German).
As part of Ukraine’s decentralisation reforms, amalgamated territorial communities (hromadas) were established. In Transcarpathia, 32 settlements were systematically selected from among the settlements belonging to 19 hromadas across six districts, based on the presence of significant Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, or German national minority populations alongside the majority population.
During the project period, researchers from the Centre, together with several university students involved as fieldworkers, conducted fieldwork on multiple occasions. We documented the contemporary linguistic landscape of the hromadas in Transcarpathia through photographs. In total, photographs were taken in 65 settlements, adding approximately 2,100 new photographs to the linguistic landscape database of the Hodinka Centre.
At each research site, we examined whether and to what extent the minority language concerned was present in the linguistic landscape and public spaces of the settlement, focusing on the following categories:
a) settlement-name signs;
b) street-name signs;
c) municipal institutions;
d) municipal/settlement websites;
e) educational institutions;
f) religious buildings;
g) commercial establishments;
h) advertisements and commercial notices;
i) private signs and notices;
j) cemetery inscriptions.
During the pandemic, some everyday activities moved online, and the importance of obtaining information via the internet increased considerably. We therefore also examined, as a separate component of the research, the extent to which the national minorities under study were represented in the online presence of the settlements and hromadas included in the sample. We analysed which languages appeared in posts and comments on publicly accessible official settlement pages and which languages were predominant.
Research organiser/supporter: Antal Hodinka Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Domus Group Grant
Publications:
Csernicskó István – Hires-László Kornélia – Tóth-Orosz Enikő 2022. Helységnévtáblák nyelvi sokszínűsége Kárpátalján. In: Márku Anita – Karmacsi Zoltán – Tóth-Orosz Enikő szerk. Mozaikok a magyar nyelvhasználatból: Tanulmányok a Hodinka Antal Nyelvészeti Kutatóközpont kutatásaiból VI. Törökbálint: Termini Egyesület, 11–35.
Hires-László Kornélia – Máté Réka – Tóth-Orosz Enikő 2022. Kereskedelmi egységek nyelvi tájképe: kárpátaljai román- és magyarlakta települések példája alapján. In: Márku Anita – Karmacsi Zoltán – Tóth-Orosz Enikő szerk. Mozaikok a magyar nyelvhasználatból: Tanulmányok a Hodinka Antal Nyelvészeti Kutatóközpont kutatásaiból VI. Törökbálint: Termini Egyesület, 36–54.