Language ideologies in contemporary Hungarian organized medical language management

Discourses concerning language have ideological aspects in both scholarly and everyday contexts. In the present contribution, I use data from the past two decades to examine language ideologies as they are communicated explicitly or conveyed implicitly in meta-linguistic discourse on Hungarian medical language management. Besides drawing attention to language ideologies, the paper also aims to offer suggestions for making medical language management more efficient. The material for the present study comes from approximately 80 articles published in Magyar Orvosi Nyelv [Hungarian Medical Language], between 2001 and 2017. The analysis mainly consists in identifying the most conspicuous language ideologies that are at work in the texts under investigation, using a pre-existing inventory of language ideologies. The results show that language ideologies prevailing in the analyzed articles are usually not based on actual language usage, but rather, on structuralist considerations as well as various language ideologies which uphold the authority of the standard (e.g. linguistic elitism, conservativism, purism), while the domain of language use and the layered nature of medical language are overlooked.