Language Shift on the Individual Level

This paper focuses on a sociologic approach, the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1991) and a sociolinguistic field, the language shift (Fishman 1991, Crystal 2000). It describes the theoretical background of language shift and briefly mentions the history of Hungarian language and Romanian language contacts. After presenting language use of the Hungarian minority students and explaining the theory of planned behavior, it turns to apply the theory of planned behavior to the language shift from the view of bilingual speaker(s). This paper wants to propose the application of the theory of planned behavior in language shift and open new perspective in bilingual research.