From grassroots literacy to transliteracies in the educational context of the Moldavian Csángó

Abstract

This paper investigates literacies in the Moldavian region of Romania, where bilingual speakers produce writings in a contested language they call the ‘Csángó mode of speaking’. The speakers sometimes define their language as collateral both with Standard Hungarian and Romanian. Our research question is the following: How are locally constructed collateral literacy practices transformed or neglected in standardising educational contexts? The theoretical question we raise in this article is whether Blommaert’s concept of grassroots literacy or the newer transliteracies framework is better suited to describe the process of a collateral language becoming literate. The collateral language, the Csángó mode of speaking, is no longer passed onto children by the parents, who still might use it among themselves, thus the children still might acquire a passive knowledge of it. Since 2001, a relatively popular educational programme teaching Standard Hungarian literacy has evolved. As our data, we use texts produced by c. 100 participants of the Moldavian Csángó Hungarian Educational Programme from eight villages. Our contribution is to investigate how transliteracies can constitute a resource not only for local ways of speaking, but also for the development of general literacy skills instead of skills bound to a single language.