Lexical Variation in Romanian Dialect of Vojvodina, Serbia in Comparison to the Standard Language. A Sociolinguistic Study.
Lexical Variation in Romanian Dialect of Vojvodina, Serbia in Comparison to the Standard Language. A Sociolinguistic Study.

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we tried to show how the Romanian speakers from the region of Banat in Vojvodina, Serbia, isolated from the centre of innovation, resolve the problem of the enrichment of the lexicon with words and expressions, fulfilling the lexical and conceptual gaps. When a community is separated from the country of origin, their language develops in a different direction creating a linguistic variation. We have analyzed the Romanian dialect spoken in the region of Banat in Vojvodina, Serbia, and tried to show that the process of the enrichment is done through borrowing from the dominant language, which is, in this case, Serbian. Words are borrowed because of bilingualism of the speakers, which, in general, enables new terms to enter a language more easily. The words that were borrowed earlier are adapted to a greater degree to the phonological and morpho-syntactic system of Romanian than those that have been borrowed recently. We classified the borrowings according to the most important semantic fields. We came to the conclusion that because of the lengthy contact and everyday communication with Serbian speakers, adopting elements from Serbian becomes easier.

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