ENREGISTERMENT OF SZÉKELY IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

The linguistic discourse on the geographic variability mostly touches upon creating boundaries between dialects; nevertheless, a cultural anthropological point of view has recently emerged in the sociolinguistic inquiry that also exploits the perspectives of speakers as relevant units of analysis.Though the Székely dialects are frequently mentioned and much-valued examples in common talk about the varieties of Hungarian language, no linguistic study has yet been delivered yet which tracesthe attributes that create the authentic Székely voice for the different groups (Transylvanians, Hungarians, etc.) of speakers. Our paper presents a research on a video series and its covers that voice parodically the ’enregistered’ Székely speech mode through its supposedly authentic semiotic resources, drawing on the logic of the language learning marketing. Székely nyelvlecke is a parody on the internet, which follows the different steps of the acquiring a fictional foreign language. Its appearance on social media platforms made the quick spread possible outside of Transylvania, this being facilitated by the fact that recipients can easily become active participants by reactions, comments or by creating new videos. Our paper shows that the enregisterment of Székely in such communicative context is based on the lexical and the phonetic aspects of the language supplemented by genres which are stereotypically associated with the Székely people.