ABSTRACT
Four countries in East Central Europe are discussed. For Hungary, Kontra describes urban dialectology, the contact varieties of Hungarian, and language policy and rights in Hungary and the adjacent countries.
In Slovakia, as described by Sloboda, sociolinguistic research in recent decades has deepened its interest in language policy and language cultivation in relation to the official and minority languages, and has developed systematic attention to language ideologies and to gender-related issues.
For the Czech Republic, Nekvapil discusses the organization of sociolinguistic research and focuses on the social aspects of language standardization and cultivation, and the use and elaboration of Language Management Theory. Deepening of multilingualism and superdiversity is another focus.
Since socio-political transition in Poland, speakers’ attitudes and researchers’ orientations have become increasingly open to linguistic diversity and the study of variation. Kie?kiewicz-Janowiak discusses the dynamics of language use in the context of migration, uncovers the weakening of prescriptive ideologies and the foregrounding of topics such as the politics of language and gender.
