ABSTRACT
Language suicide studies have mostly taken place in creole-speaking communities, in some of which, certain creole speakers take on lexical and grammatical features from the ex-superstratal languages. The twentieth century, however, brought a change in the fortunes of languages. When Oberwart was granted to Austria, the Hungarian elite migrated to Hungary, and the Hungarian speakers who stayed behind were mainly peasants. Hungarian gradually lost prestige and German conversely became the dominant language in more and more contexts, and is continuing to do so. The continuum model was meant to serve as an analytical tool that could be used to 'calculate' and represent a type of variation that emerges in some creole-speaking communities. The continuum model assumes that the interaction of a creole and its lexical source language produces varieties that range from the basilect through to the acrolect: 'polar varieties between which there is continuous variation'.
