ROMANIAN GERMAN AS A STANDARD VARIETY FROM A HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The Germans in Romania are not an ethnically uniform population, but different language communities. As a result of the massive emigration of Romanian Germans after the collapse of the communist dictatorship in 1989, the language situation has changed considerably. The article starts from the special status of German in Romania, which has been the supra-regional lingua franca of historical German language communities and currently of a dwindling population, in order to shed light on lexical peculiarities of Romanian German as a standard variety, which today is increasingly used by Romanians or Hungarians who have acquired German at schools where German is the language of instruction. Starting from the role of identity-forming institutions (church, school system, press and literature) for the preservation of the language, the current status of German in public language use is also outlined.

Keywords: Romanian German; standard variety; lexical features; Romanian German language communities; current language situation; language maintenance.