Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Dialogue, understood as reciprocal social interaction, is currently regarded as the most important means of resolving situations of all kinds in contemporary society. Even expressions such as intercultural, interethnic, or intercommunity dialogue in fact describe a type of cooperation achieved through dialogical interaction. We believe that, alongside the concept of “conversational history” (Golopenția Eretescu 1985), we may also place that of “dialogic history,” which refers to sequences jointly experienced by dialogue partners during the diachronic progression of episodic dialogic phases preceding the present moment. This concept takes on particular significance when delineating the process by which dialogue manifests within multilingual communities. In this study, we begin with the linguistic example of Romance-language countries (especially Italian-, French-, and Spanish-speaking) to which Romanians have emigrated since the 1989 Revolution. More specifically, we draw on the well-recognized linguistic affinities between Romanian and these sister Romance languages, as they appear both online and in real-world speech, to examine certain features of communication in such plurilingual communities. Our focus is primarily on issues of lexicology and pragmalinguistics. Linguistic communities transplanted into a setting different from their native environment form “linguistic islands” which, over time, become integrated not only into the new host society but also into the prestige language – that is, the language they adopt. The stage of transition toward such “absorption” is characteristic of plurilingual (or multilingual) communities, which are defined by linguistic contact, interference, and borrowing. The sine qua non condition for dialogue between partners from different linguistic backgrounds is that both be bilingual. In the present paper, we seek to situate the concept of code-switching within the semantic domain of bilingualism and plurilingualism. In other words, we aim to define and characterize it in light of demographic data reflecting the factual reality of Romanian emigration to territories where a language other than Romanian is spoken. We examine the ways in which emigrants have understood integration – embracing both lifestyle and borrowed language – and the extent to which they retain behavioral and linguistic “relics” from their mother tongue. Finally, starting from the manner in which conversation is structured within bilingual communities in Romania as well as abroad – where Romanian remains the mother tongue – we highlight aspects that significantly influence communication in general and bilingual dialogue in particular. Methodologically, we draw on principles from sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and lexicology. Our corpus is compiled from online sources and from dialogues recorded by the author in real time during field visits to communities offering hybrid verbal samples.
Authors: Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca, Centrul Universitar Nord Baia Mare, Daiana Felecan
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417034583