The virtual linguistic landscape of ecclesiastical schools in Transcarpathia

Abstract

We live in an age where everywhere we look, thousands of pieces of information are streaming towards us. This fact in itself highlights the importance of the linguistic landscape in our everyday lives, as everything that surrounds us, everything we perceive influences our thinking and therefore our use of language. In the 21st century, we need to pay particular attention to the virtual world, as a large percentage of the younger and even older generations receive a significant proportion of their stimuli through some types of electronic communication tools or social platforms. Schools have a particularly important role in language development and formation, as young people, the future generation, are most shaped within their walls. In the present study, we analysed a sample of posts published in the last few years on the social platforms (official website and Facebook) of the ecclesiastical schools of Transcarpathia. We relied on statistical and comparative analysis of the textual content of these entries. In addition, we examined the meta-linguistic information of the entries. The overall visual appearance of the website was also taken into consideration, i.e., the types of images published were also investigated. In the research, it was assumed that all the official webpages of the schools under investigation contain entries in both Ukrainian and Hungarian. We also assessed whether a higher percentage of entries in Hungarian appeared on the schools’ online interfaces. Results showed that the number of interactions by people who followed the sites was higher for Hungarian language posts, advertisements and articles. We assumed that religious posts and symbols regularly appeared on the websites and Facebook pages, and that a higher percentage of these posts and symbols appeared in Hungarian. It was also hypothesized that the volume of texts in Ukrainian was smaller than the amount of texts in Hungarian. The research has confirmed that both Ukrainian and Hungarian entries are found on the websites, with a higher share of entries in Hungarian. It also confirmed our hypothesis that followers of the websites tend to respond more frequently to posts in Hungarian, due to the fact that the majority of followers use Hungarian as their mother tongue. Last but not least, the research revealed that religious posts and symbols regularly appear on the official websites and Facebook pages of the lyceums, and the language of these posts is mostly Hungarian.