Discriminative linguistic landscape in the school network of Tîrgu-Mureș/Marosvásárhely

Tîrgu Mureș-Marosvásárhely,2010- 3 October, 2017℘

In TîrguMureș/Marosvásárhely, the school network includes approximately 45 educational institutions most of them function as mixed institutions, having both Hungarian and Romanian speaking classes.However, the internal and external linguistic landscape of most of these institutions are exclusively Romanian;public interest information is presented only in Romanian, names of classrooms and administrative offices are monolingual. Administrative personnel, school nurses and doctors, librariansoften do not speak Hungarian, andprimary school pupils (between age 6 and 10) cannot communicate with them without their teachers, who need to act as translators and interpreters.

Law no. 215/2001 on local public administration stipulates that „in the territorial-administrative units where citizens belonging to national minorities have a share of over 20% of residents, the local government authorities and public institutions subordinated to them shall ensure mother tongue inscriptions of and shall display mother tongue notices of general interest.” Moreover, Law no. 1/2011on educationstates that „the education performed in the language of the national minorities, the internal communication, and the communication with the pupils’ and preschoolers’ parents may becarried out in the language in which the tuition is performed.”

The National Council for Combating Discrimination (NCCD)—the state level equality body—found that monolingual linguistic landscape of the four schoolsincluded in the complaint is discriminatory against the Hungarian students (NCCD decision no. 172 of 2011).The four schools and a kindergarten included in the complaint were:

• Európa Általános Iskolaés a Mesebeli HázikóÓvoda / Școala Gimnazială „Europa”, Grădinița cu program prelungit „Căsuța din Povești” (Europe Elementary School and Fairy Tale House Kindergarten)
• Liviu Rebreanu ÁltalánosIskola / Școala Gimnazială „LiviuRebreanu” (Liviu Rebreabu Elementary School)
• Dacia Általános Iskola / Școala Gimnazială „Dacia” (Dacia Elementary School)
• Dr. BernádyGyörgy ÁltalánosIskola / ȘcoalaGimnazială „Dr. BernádyGyörgy (BernádyGyörgy Elementary School)

Furthermore, a separate NCCD complaint was filed in 2013 covering the entire school network of the town, including both kindergartens and schools. NCCD in its new decisionhas listed a set of criteria which must be implemented in order to create bilingual linguistic landscape in the educational institutions (NCCD decision no. 415 of 2014).  

Up until this date,only four schools and a few kindergartens changed their linguistic landscape; the majority of the institutions remained reluctant to create bilingual landscape. Since the situation remained unresolved, in 2016, another complaint was submitted to the NCCD regarding the linguistic landscape of approximately 30 educational institutions, including kindergartens, elementary schools and middle schools, and vocational schools. So far, the NCCD found 16 institutions’ linguistic landscape discriminatory against Hungarian children and students. (NCCD decisions: no.182of 2017, no.623 of 2016 (this decision covers 14 institutions), no.154 of 2017.

The list of schools affected by the decisions: