Housed at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, The Survey of Spoken Hungarian (alias The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview ) aims to investigate the social and stylistic stratification of the Hungarian spoken in the capital city of Budapest. In 1987, 50 pilot interviews were conducted with a quota sample of ten teachers over 50 years of age, ten university students, ten blue-collar workers, ten sales clerks, and ten vocational trainees aged 15-16.
In 1988-1989, 200 tape-recorded interviews were completed in Budapest. This latter phase of our study is called The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BSI), Version 3. The 200 informants interviewed form the Budapest subsample of the 1000-strong national sample used for the pen-and-paper Hungarian National Sociolinguistic Survey (cf. Kontra 1995). The BSI project is heavily indebted to Labov (1984) and the Survey of Vancouver English (Gregg 1984). In the transcription and coding of the recordings we followed the Survey of English Usage to some extent.
Over the past decade the BSI project has undergone several changes both in the composition of the research team and in the methodology used in transcribing, coding and checking the data. We have increasingly felt the need to record and make available some of the fundamental principles and research tools of our project and for this reason we are publishing The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview, Version 3 , From Cards to Computer Files: Processing the Data of the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview and Manual of the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview Data as Nos 2, 3 and 4, respectively, of the Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics.
The original version of what is published here was discussed and critiqued by a small international gathering in Budapest in 1988. The current revised version contains the English translation of the original Hungarian protocol used in the fieldwork in 1988-89. It also lists references to relevant papers which have since been published.
December 12, 1997 Miklós Kontra & Tamás Váradi
Gregg, R. J. 1984. Final Report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on An Urban Dialect Survey of the English Spoken in Vancouver. Vancouver: Linguistics Department, University of British Columbia.
Kontra, Miklós. 1995. On current research into spoken Hungarian. International Journal of the Sociology of Language # 111:5-20.
Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In: John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, eds., Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, 28-53. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.