The Transylvanian Babel: Negotiating national identity through language in a disputed territory

Both Hungarians and Romanians regard Transylvania as their ancestral homeland. The region’s identity has been shaped in debates which exploit archeological, historical and linguistic claims. Of these, our focus lies on the conflicting appeals to linguistic evidence by Romanian and Hungarian scholars. Our aim is to try to analyze the understanding of language which informs these arguments. We seek to examine how scholars’ explicit or implicit language theory shapes their political and historical claims, and vice/versa, to determine how ideological agendas dictate to them a particular concept of language.