The Anglicization Era – A Global Communicating Dream

Gina Necula (University of “Dunarea de Jos”, Galati, Romania) [BIO]

Email: ginadnln@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

Since the 1991 Maastricht summit, the general tendency in Europe has been oriented towards creating the European Union and implementing unique institutions, policy and currency. When referring to language, we have been witnessing a similar trend in developing “a standard language”, the European lingua franca, English having already assumed this status, being widely used within the European Union. Voices have already been heard speaking out the consequences of the Europeanization process, viewed in terms of promises and threats, pointing out both to the prospects of fertile collaboration between the European nations, but also to the risk of losing rich cultural distinctiveness.

The Europeanization process has “contaminated” Romania, too, so that recent years have witnessed a growing tendency in adopting anglicisms into the Romanian language. At this point, we are wondering to what extent this process is a matter of present trend or fashion (as Romanian already provides its speakers with its proper counterparts), or it stands for a linguistic necessity to refresh or enrich the Romanian language.

Our paper aims therefore at pointing out the motivation(s) of the recent massive inroading of anglicisms into Romanian language by examining different linguistic levels (especially syntactical), and Romanians’ openness in adopting them. We try to demonstrate that the growing influence of English as a result of globalization tendencies has no destructive effects upon the structure of Romanian language – as some linguists might complain – because this goes into the direction of the ineluctable uniformisation of the planet and it allows a great number of individuals to communicate directly.