Miklós Kontra: Teaching Language, (Higher)Education, Language Policy
Language planning is a kind of planning that aims to influence language or language usage. It represents such conscious efforts of which goal is to influence the behaviour of people with learning a language (languages), in connection with its structural and usage functions. Language planning generally happens for the sake of social, political, or economic goals. Language planning is the realisation of language policy.
Language rights and their violation exist for a long time, but their scientific examination is being provided only for a few decades. During the big social arguments, discussions the language rights many times fall behind, for example environment protection or globalisation issues are incomparably more discussed than discussions in connections with language variety.
The bilingual issue has more definitions. The definitions of non-linguists differ from the definitions of linguists. The non-linguists often call only those people bi-lingual who speak two languages well the same way (almost perfectly). The linguists know that such people are very rare. Linguists define bilinguality more widely: bilingual is such person who speaks two language on whatever level. Therefore, even that person is bilingual, who writes, reads, and speaks Hungarian on mother language level, but he/she can understand a (written or spoken) writing/speaking in Romanian language with big difficulties.
The remaining of a minority language has three preconditions. The first is that the speakers have to know the language, the second is that they should have the opportunity to use their language, and the third is that the minority wants to use its language.
The UNESCO supports teaching in mother language (for example: Education in a multilingual world), and also minority language higher education /The European Chapter of Regional or Minority Languages (8. article, e. point) and The Hague Recommendations (17. and 18. points)/. The lack of Hungarian national strategy and language strategy naturally led to mistakes – that could had been evaded – in connection with higher education institutions with Hungarian teaching language.
Although not everybody will agree with me that minority Hungarian universities and higher education bilingual institutions should exist, such institutions where teaching is provided not only in Hungarian language, but in both teaching languages. The two goals, that is teaching in the mother language and bilingual teaching does not exclude on another, if we consider the addition and not the exchange model.