It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

This chapter draws cross-linguistic comparisons among the patterns reported in Chapter 5 for three linguistic variables that occur in at least three languages in the project: (VOT), (CASE), and (PRODROP). Conditioning factors, both linguistic and social, are discussed. Collapsing across rate and constraint hierarchy for each variable, we note any indication of change in either. Half the context we examine exhibit stability. Of the eight that indicate difference, half of these can be attributed to English (including both convergence and divergence). With few differences between homeland and heritage speakers to work with, we find few generalizations about what parts of the language, or which languages, change. We do see more change in one morphosyntactic variable, (CASE), than in the phonetic variable (VOT), but less in the other morphosyntactic variable (PRODROP).

The chapter focuses on two sets of items with hypocoristic function in Hungarian: 1. so-called embellished clippings, i.e. truncations that are subsequently furnished with one of the diminutive/endearment suffixes, such as Feri (Ferenc), Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló (Zoltán), Kata/Kati/Kató (Katalin); 2. reduplications, typically consisting of two identical CV syllables. These can be based on first names, surnames, or some common nouns referring to people, denoting kinship relationships, profession, or property, e.g., Zozó (Zoltán), Zsozsó (Zsófia), Kokó (Kovács). Except for reduplications that are based on surnames, for all the others there is also at least one parallel hypocoristic form of the former type, i.e. an embellished clipping: Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló – Zozó (Zoltán); Zsófi/Zsóca – Zsozsó (Zsófia). The goal of this chapter is to document the range of possibilities as well as to try to account for this peculiar distribution in the sense of which morphological processes interact with each other and in which order, but also in the sense of suggesting the factors that may have facilitated this state of affairs.

History seemed to be on the side of Hungarian refugees arriving in Britain in the winter of 1956–1957. Public sympathy for these ‘heroes’ who had stood up to Soviet oppression chimed with wider Cold War politics, while an expanding economy in need of workers seemed to ensure that they would settle quickly into British society. But if Britain’s enthusiastic welcome of the Hungarians – supported by a mammoth voluntary effort – seemed to show it as a self-confident nation, cracks rapidly began to show. The Suez crisis had revealed Britain’s waning power, a trend reflected in many Hungarian refugees’ desire to move on to America or Canada. Refugees’ lack of ‘gratitude’ was to come up time and again as volunteers, camp workers and the public found Hungarians uncooperative and demanding. Resonating with contemporary fears over generational conflict, once ‘resettled’, wayward behaviour by young male refugees saw them labelled ‘juvenile delinquents’ or ‘Central European teddy boys’. Where their foreignness intersected with local concerns with competition over work or local ‘girls’, xenophobia spilled over into hostility and violence. This was in many ways a foretaste the 1958 Notting Hill riots, and demonstrated that beneath a veneer of British self-confidence, many Britons were experiencing profound disquiet at the ways in which the country was changing.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

The dedication of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German intelligentsia to collecting and consuming folk music was fostered by a belief that a repository of wisdom lay with the common people and that, by drawing together the peasant songs of various regions where German was spoken, one could grasp a German national identity [see Ch. 26 ‘Politics and Religion’] where, politically, none existed.