The Representation of Migration in the Hungarian Context

Abstract

Despite the decreasing number of immigrants and their negligible presence, migration has dominatedHungarian public discourse. The article investigates issues related to migration in three contexts. First,samples from the government’s immigration discourse, including a legislative package proposal andbillboards, are subjected to critical discourse analysis to establish what terminology and rhetoricaldevices are used to evoke particular kinds of emotion in the readers. Second, the billboards of a countercampaign organised by a Hungarian joke political party are explored to examine how they managed toturn around the message of the official campaign. Third, the paper investigates whether state educationin Hungary can establish the golden mean and provide a balanced view of migration. For exploring thelatter question, documents, such as the Hungarian National Core Curriculum in general and the sectionon the teaching of foreign languages in particular are analysed. The findings of the analyses showinconsistencies in the use of the relevant terminology and a predominantly biased view of migration inHungary.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).