Hungarian Beyond the Border¹ On the Contexts of Education, Bilingualism, and Labour Market in the Early 21^st Century. The Transylvanian Perspective

Borders are particular (in-between) spaces: they have this side and the other side, which involve several real and imaginary spaces at the same time. For minorities, “beyond the borders” is also a specific space of language use. This paper discusses the correlations between minority bilingualism and social structure characteristics based on sociological surveys, taking as approach the sociology of space and John Ogbu’s ecological cultural model of schooling. It aims to offer an overview of my research carried out on this topic and tries to provide some references for rethinking the sociological implications of minority education considering the experiences of three decades since the fall of communism in Romania. The main results of this research – in concordance with other findings of similar inquiries – show that a mother-tongue education for ethnic Hungarian children in Romania is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reducing the structural gap that Hungarians in Transylvania have inherited from the 20^th century. This study is centred on the aspects of interrelation between the language of education and labour market, more specifically on those linked to the attitudes and patterns of behaviour towards the official language, with particular focus on the role that languages play in the society and, in a narrower sense, in self-positioning on the labour market.