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Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

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    Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

    Ad hoc, I see you live in a majority Hungarian district within Romania. Could I trouble you with my curiousity about how people there deal with the ethnic/linguistic divide? (Sorry if you've already commented on these issues on here, in which case it would be great if someone could give me a pointer to where to find the old thread). Questions that occurred to me include:

    - is there a lot of tension between the majority H and minority R local communities?
    - is there tension around the constitutional settlement for the region in terms of autonomy, devolved powers etc?
    - is there a lot of language war twattery of the kind which plagues Belgium?
    - are there parallel Romanian-speaking and Hungarian-speaking facilities such as schools etc?
    - and, if this isn't too directly personal, are you fluent yourself in both of those languages?

    I'm interested in how it compares with the South Tyrol, where a friend of mine has lived with his family for over a decade now (in an almost entirely German-speaking village).

    #2
    Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

    EEG: Polly Portillo's fogey-interrail BBC show was in Romania last week. He visited Transylvania (Dracula museum, fairytale castle, some bears shitting in the woods) but skirted around any competing nationalisms.

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      #3
      Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

      Thanks DG, I recorded that and have already watched the first half (the Transylvanian bit). Certainly made me keen to go there on hols. By coincidence, the same day I read a passage in which Bill Bryson gently takes the piss out of Portillo's previous, UK-based, rail travel series in his Little Dribbling book.

      I was speaking to a Romanian guy the other day who described some experience he had travelling through the Hungarian district which sounded a bit like what an unlucky English tourist might have encountered in a north Welsh village in the old days.

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        #4
        Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

        Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: Ad hoc, I see you live in a majority Hungarian district within Romania. Could I trouble you with my curiousity about how people there deal with the ethnic/linguistic divide? (Sorry if you've already commented on these issues on here, in which case it would be great if someone could give me a pointer to where to find the old thread). Questions that occurred to me include:

        - is there a lot of tension between the majority H and minority R local communities?
        Tension is perhaps overstating it. Irritation. Annoyance. People will bitch about the other community in private, but face to face things are pretty good. As is standard I suspect the majority of the tension is whipped up in Bucharest and Budapest where it suits the media and the politicians.

        I think sometimes the local Romanian minority get annoyed at what they perceive as being an oppressed minority in their own country. But the vast majority of local Romanians I know have learned Hungarian fluently, which they don't really have to have done to get by at all.

        - is there tension around the constitutional settlement for the region in terms of autonomy, devolved powers etc?
        There is some. Trianon specificaly says that the Szekely (the group who live where I am) should have a form of autonomy within Romania, but this has never been given. There is no autonomy at all, and Romania in general is a very centralised country. To a very large degree it is constitutionally modelled on France. This includes a belief that all Romanians should be enthusiastically Romanian (something which is not likely to ever happen where I live)

        - is there a lot of language war twattery of the kind which plagues Belgium?
        There's some. Though any incident is blown up massively. It seems every single Romanian in the entire country has found themselves in a bread shop in Transylvania and been unable to order a loaf of bread because the staff have been unable or unwilling to speak Romanian to them. This story is always told, is always "it hapend to me" or "it happend to my mother", and is always in a bread shop. I don;t believe bakers are simply all cunts, so I have a very very strong suspicion that this is bollocks (though f course it will have happened once or twice). My own experience is that every time I go into a shop or cafe and speak in Hungarian they will always reply to me in Romanian assuming that's my first language (as Hungarian obviously isn't)

        On the other side, occasionally in my wife's home town which is split 50/50, is I ask for something in Romanian I might get a very aggressive "I don;t speak that language" (in Romanian) whereas a simple "Pardon" would have conveyed the same message in a much less obnoxious way

        - are there parallel Romanian-speaking and Hungarian-speaking facilities such as schools etc?
        Schools yes. My kids go to Hungarian medium schools. I wish there were proper bilingual schools though, since the effect of this (relatively enlightened) education policy is that kids never mix with the other community. Which i think is a bad start to life. There are some issues I have with the curriculum though (something I became temporarily famous for expressing here: http://szekely.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/romanian-education-system-3.html a post which got translated into Romanian (with my permission) and published in the biggest Romanian broadsheet paper. For a week the phone was rining off the hook with journalists attemptig to get me to be interviewed or go on TV or stand for parliamet or what have you. I turned them down (mostly because it scared the shit out of Mrs hoc who, having grown up under Ceausescu, fears being singed out by the state apparatus and media, because it never ends well)
        - and, if this isn't too directly personal, are you fluent yourself in both of those languages?
        No, Not at all. I speak and understand Hungarian at an intermediate level (A2/B1 for anyone familiar with the European Frame of Reference for languages), and understand Romanian at about the same level, though speak it terribly poorly, because I rarely get any practice (and nearly all the Romanians I know speak English well, which is not true of the all the Hungarians). I can watch Romanian TV news though and pretty much follow without much difficulty (it's a damn site easier than Hungarian, which helps there)

        I'm interested in how it compares with the South Tyrol, where a friend of mine has lived with his family for over a decade now (in an almost entirely German-speaking village).
        I'd be interested in the same. It's often compared to Sud Tyrol for a number of reasons, and I'd sort of like to know about how things are there.

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          #5
          Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

          Having visited Sud Tirol on several occasions, the quotidian situation sounds rather similar to the situation that ad hoc describes, though the political situation is more charged, largely (I think) due to the fact that the region shares a border with Austria, thus making separatist visions seem more realistic than they would be in the Szekely. This is especially true given the overlay of North/South tensions in Italy, where a meaningful part of the Italian-speaking population thinks that it would be better off in a country that didn't extend south of Florence.

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            #6
            Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

            Thanks very much for those answers, ad hoc. Really interesting stuff.

            On the South Tyrol, based on the conversations I've had with my friend there (a Welshman who married a German woman in England, started a family and moved out with her to S Tyrol, which was readily compatible with work as they are both self-employed translators dealing with clients over the internet), the level of irritation sounds broadly similar.

            It's a very asymmetric situation in S Tyrol because of the history: prior to 1918 it was entirely Germanic I understand, but then Italy acquired it under the post-WW1 settlement and a little bit later Mussolini decided it needed assimilating by deliberately orchestrating the move into the region of large numbers of Italians, mainly from the south of Italy, not the surrounding Italian areas. So the cities are majority-populated by Italians of soutnern heritage and the countryside residents are overwhelmingly German-speaking. I understand there are quotas for popular use of public facilities (e.g. municipally funded clubs, see anecdote below). Also, I think Gareth told me that public employees in a public-facing role in the region are supposed to be required to be bilingual in theory, but in practice many such employees have only rudimentary German, which understandably irritates locals. Gareth said that he'd heard a woman in hospital in Bolzano being addressed by a worker there as "Frau!" (an attempted translation of "Signora!").

            The anecdote I recall, from many many years ago, involved a native English speaker living out there (can't remember if Gareth said it was him or a friend) who wanted to become a member of a municipal sports facility of some kind, and had a conversation with the relevant council officer along the following lines:

            "We have two waiting lists, one for German speakers and one for Italian speakers. Which are you?"

            "Er, neither or both really. I'm English, and I speak both German and Italian."

            "Well, you have to choose. Do you want to call yourself a German or Italian speaker?"

            *chooses one*

            "Ah, bad luck, that's a longer waiting list at the moment"

            "Oh, in that case I'm [the other one]"

            "No, no, it's too late now, you said you were a [ } speaker."

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              #7
              Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

              Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:
              It's a very asymmetric situation in S Tyrol because of the history: prior to 1918 it was entirely Germanic I understand, but then Italy acquired it under the post-WW1 settlement and a little bit later Mussolini decided it needed assimilating by deliberately orchestrating the move into the region of large numbers of Italians, mainly from the south of Italy, not the surrounding Italian areas. So the cities are majority-populated by Italians of soutnern heritage and the countryside residents are overwhelmingly German-speaking.
              This is pretty close indeed to the situation where I am, right down to the dates.

              Mind you we don;t have those mad sounding quotas.

              (please tell me that the Romanian you met the other day told a story where he couldn;t get served in a bread shop)

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                #8
                Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

                ha ha, it was some months ago actually so I can't remember exactly what context he was recounting, but it was that kind of story.

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                  #9
                  Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

                  .

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                    #10
                    Qs for ad hoc on his adopted home

                    You'll be wanting this thread http://www.wsc.co.uk/forum-index/28-world/1256268-another-racist-referendum

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