National feeling or responsibility: The case of the Csángó language revitalization* KLÁRA SÁNDOR Abstract During the past decades several attempts have been made in various parts of the world to revitalize languages whose speakers are constant- ly decreasing. Such an attempt was also made in Hungary and the Hungarian-speaking regions of Rumania in the 1990s, when some people attempted to revitalize the one-time Hungarian mother tongue of the Csángós, an originally Hungarian-speaking group which has lived for centuries in isolation from the other Hungarian-speaking re- gions. The majority of the Csángós are monolingual Rumanian speak- ers today but some of them still speak their Csángó dialects of Hungarian origin. As part of the revitalization program, Csángó youths were taken to Hungarian schools and universities in Transylva- nia (Rumania) and Hungary to learn Hungarian. After a brief introduc- tion of the Csángós, this paper analyzes the reasons why this schooling action was doomed to inevitable failure. The program suffered from a lack of linguistic and pedagogical planning, and those involved in its implementation disregarded the linguistic, cultural, social, and eco- nomic differences between the Csángós and the Hungarians. Introduction In Rumanian Moldavia, in the foothills of the Eastern-Carpathians and in the valley of the River Siret (Hungarian Szeret) lives the ethnic group known as the Csángó [ča:ngo:]. In Robin Baker’s (1997: 658) phrasing they are ‘one of Europe’s most enigmatic and least known ethnic minorities’. According to widely accepted estimates the number of Csángós is about 240,000. 1 They live in about 90 villages scattered mostly around Roman (Hungarian: Román- vásár) and Bacău (Hungarian Bákó). Their forefathers were Hungarians, but now most of them have shifted language and speak Rumanian as their mother