High School Students’ Perceptions of Code-Switching in a Bilingual Environment

The paper explores the opinions of two hundred Hungarian secondary school students in Slovakia on the code-switching between Hungarian as a minority language and Slovak as the state language. The results of the research show, on the one hand, that the students in the study have rather contradictory opinions about the code-switching; on the other hand, that students who have more experience with Slovak in everyday life are more accepting of the code-switching than students who have more limited contact with the state language. In many cases, the self-reported responses of code-switching-rejecting students are based on a language myth that conveys negative value judgements, due to the lack of knowledge of bilinguals and their use of the language.