Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)
BOOK REVIEWS - Csaba Czeglédi: Endre Vázsonyi: Túl a Kacegárdán, Culmet-vidéki amerikai magyar szótár [Beyond Castle Garden: An American Hungarian Dictionary of the Calumet Region]. Edited and introduction by Miklós Kontra. A Magyarország-kutatás könyv-tára XV. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995. 242 pp
(Krauss 1992:4—5). Many of the languages that were moribund a few years ago are probably extinct now. Every time the last speaker of an unrecorded language dies his language dies with him, and with each language gone the diversity of the phenomenon of natural language as well as our chance to better understand its nature suffers. It is an ecological, if not a cultural, commonplace that the diversity of the fauna and flora is mankind's invaluable heritage. The diversity of natural languages is no less valuable for linguistic research. Therefore it is hard to overestimate the significance of records of endangered languages or languages that have, by now, become extinct. The set of extinct or endangered languages and dialects is larger than many of us would have imagined, and it is growing at an astonishing rate. Many people may not have known that only fairly recently the set of extinct languages gained a new member. A variety of Hungarian which was still spoken some thirty years ago by a community of Hungarian-American immigrants in the Calumet region, south-east of Chicago, is now gone forever. Beyond Castle Garden is the first and only record of this short-lived dialect —American Hungarian (AH). In addition to the significance of its AH data for a better understanding of language contact phenomena in general and the processes of interference, borrowing, and language loss, Beyond Castle Garden has plenty to offer to the general reader as well. It contains some instructive reading for those interested not only in the language but also in the life and culture of a community of Hungarians who once lived in the Calumet region. To more linguistically minded readers, it offers a concise introduction to some basic sociolinguistic concepts and issues, such as language contact, bilingualism, interference, code switching, etc. The book opens with two short prefaces —one in Hungarian (Előszó, 6) and one in English (Preface, 7), both written by Miklós Kontra, in which the editor introduces the reader to the compiler Andrew Vázsonyi and his wife and co-fieldworker Linda Dégh, who 176
