Between Courtesy and Common Use: the Use of the Pronoun dânsa in Romanian
Between Courtesy and Common Use: the Use of the Pronoun dânsa in Romanian

Summary/Abstract: This study explores the use of the Romanian pronoun dânsa, with particular attention to its dual function: as both a polite form and a non-polite usage. Building on recent observations in Gramatica limbii române (GALR 2008), Vol. I – Cuvântul, which highlights ongoing changes in the interpretation and use of this pronoun, the present research seeks to examine the relationship between these two uses. Given that corpus linguistics is still underdeveloped in Romania (Bleorțu, Seiciuc 2024), we relied on the large-scale corpus available through SketchEngine, specifically the RoTenTen 2021 subcorpus. This corpus offers a valuable resource for Romanian, although it does not provide access to metadata such as age, level of education, gender, place or date of utterance – factors that could otherwise enrich a sociolinguistic or diachronic analysis. For this preliminary investigation, we focused exclusively on the form dânsa (excluding other case forms or the alternate spelling dânsa). Using SketchEngine, we identified a total of 1,624 occurrences of dânsa. Contrary to expectations based on the GALR 2008 description, the majority of instances did not convey a polite meaning. Only one occurrence was clearly used in a polite context, while 1,623 instances reflected standard, non-polite usage. Additionally, 211 uses involved reference to objects or abstractions / entities designated by means of proper nouns, and 17 to animals. These findings suggest a marked shift in the distribution and function of dânsa, raising important questions about its evolving role in contemporary Romanian. It is very likely that these examples originate from northern Romania, since both the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași and the Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava advocate for preserving the spelling with î rather than â. Alternatively, they could be from elderly individuals who were educated before the 1993 orthographic reforms, when the Romanian Academy adopted the new rules inspired by the interwar period, reintroducing â instead of î. Of course, these are merely hypotheses that cannot be confirmed based on this corpus alone. For this reason, in future studies we will also analyze the other inflected forms of the pronoun dânsa (including those spelled as dânsa) found in the same corpus, and we will additionally include a questionnaire.

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