Vowel harmony in the speech of English-Hungarian bilinguals of Vancouver

The thesis aims at identifying the problematic issues of Hungarian vowel harmony and discussing the results of the sociolinguistic experiment. The objective of this study is to relate findings in the literature on Hungarian vowel harmony to the results of the experiment. Though there exists abundant research on Hungarian vowel harmony, there is relatively little known about the realization of vowel harmony in the speech of bilingual Hungarian speakers. In my experiment I recorded the responses of 30 participants in order to determine their selection of suffix vowels, their use of vowel harmony and their deviation from the standard responses. I examined vowel harmony in three speaker groups with different lengths of stay in Canada and hypothesized that differences in the use of vowel harmony could be attributed to them. Based on the results of the experiment, I propose that there is evidence of language change in progress.