Particularities of Romanian as acquired by young bilingual immigrants in Spain

• Main Author: Paul Buzilă
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2016-05-01
• Series: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics
• Subjects: language contact; bilingualism; linguistic interference; Rumañol
• Online Access: http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/5.BWPL_2016_1_Buzila.pdf

Romanian immigration in Spain reached its peak towards the end of the 2000’s, putting the Romanians on the first place among the immigrant communities in Spain. Several linguistic studies have already posited the existence of a new Romanian variety, the so-called Rumañol, strongly marked by linguistic interference phenomena. This paper uses a quantitative approach and compares the amounts of interference that can be observed in the speech of two distinct immigrant groups, early and late bilinguals, in order to reveal the particularities of the Romanian variety spoken by Romanian children born in or taken to Spain at early ages.