BUILDING ROMANIAN LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL SKILLS IN CHILDREN FROM ROMANIAN FAMILIES CURRENTLY LIVING IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
BUILDING ROMANIAN LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL SKILLS IN CHILDREN FROM ROMANIAN FAMILIES CURRENTLY LIVING IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Author(s): Laura-Elena Suna
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education, School education, Pedagogy
Published by: Editura Universităţii Vasile Goldiş
Keywords: immigrants; national language; traditions and customs;
Summary/Abstract: British values encourage or at least allow keeping and celebrating the immigrants’ cultural specificity. Romanians represent one of the largest populations of immigrants in the UK, in spite of Brexit. Being a multi-cultural society, Great Britain promotes (at least in theory) an encouraging attitude towards preserving the cultural identity, including national language, of all the populations living here. Romanians seem different from other Eastern European immigrants; although they value traditions and customs, many parents show less interest towards passing on of the most important elements of cultural identity: language. For various reasons (which we suspect to be similar in other countries such as Spain and Italy) many Romanian children born in the United Kingdom, but also those who were born in Romania and moved here, speak little Romanian and, in some cases, no Romanian atall, in most social contexts. This paper aims at exploring how speakers of Romanian, children in particular, are supported, once they move to the United Kingdom, in order to integrate, and also the degree to which the British society allows and promotes preserving the young people’s native language and other cultural aspects. On the other hand, it also seeks to show the Romanian Government’s attempts to support literacy in Romanian in Great Britain. Maybe even more importantly, the paper is trying to highlight the interest and efforts made by Romanian parents living in the United Kingdom to keep the Romanian language and culture alive in their families. Beyond understanding the reasons for which there is not much interest in many cases, we support the necessity for linguistic and cultural skills to be built and reinforced in this generation of young people with Romanian roots, who risk losing an important part of their identity.

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