(My) Romanian: A Diasporic Journey
HAPPY MOTHER TONGUE DAY!
Romanian is a Romance language, although few people realize that. If they already know or want to discover where Romania is on a map, they will be quite surprised to find out its Latin origins. Engulfed by countries where the Slavic influence is heavy (minus Hungary and Moldova), it is fascinating, if not a miracle, to realize how a language managed to resist its Latinness despite historical, political, and economic circumstances, invasions, and/or other barriers.
My name is C?t?lina Florina Florescu, I was born in Romania in the ‘70’s, a decade when my country was part of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, when one lives in dictatorship (like I did until the age of 14), one is repeatedly told to be proud of their roots and carry them on. There is nothing wrong with that statement, if one realizes that all roots will branch out because they do not ever live/exist/survive in isolation. Similarly, in one’s family, people are given the same advice: take care of your elders and respect and continue their traditions. But sometimes, a country and/or a family may forget that we are individuals with free will.
This is going to be a very personal journey into what Romanian is and means to me. One can easily Google to discover the history of my mother tongue.[1] Growing up in Tulcea, Dobrogea, next to the Danube River and so close to Constan?a and its opening to the Black Sea, I was exposed to Romanian as well as to words coming from several linguistic traditions. That happened because of the people and their respective lineage that co-existed peacefully in that region. (I do not want to open a traumatic discussion, and yet I am proud that Dobrogea had and still has a peaceful and tolerant approach when cp. with Transylvania.)
Growing up, just in the apartment bloc where I lived, there were neighbors who used words coming from their ancestors’ respective mother tongues (iaurt/yogurt); ?iret/cunning); dambla/whim, of Turkish descent; anapoda/backwards; ipsos/plaster, of Greek decent; ?ni?el/schnitzel; poli?ist/ police man, of German descent; etc.) While Marcel Proust introduced the famous madeleine reinventing the writing process, I was given the gift of being born in a multiethnic region that, unbeknownst to me, prepared me for living in diaspora.
In addition, if there is something that I cherish deeply and dearly about Romanian, the answer comes quickly and unflinchingly: I love its phonetic attribute and five diacritics. If a French national is told to spell, “How are you, little girl with brown shoes?”, they could not do that phonetically (i.e., what one hears is exactly what/how one writes): “Comment vas-tu, petite fille aux chaussures marron?” On the other hand, being a phonetic language, the same question will be read and written like this: “Cum e?ti, feti?o cu pantofi maro?” The diacritics are fascinating and, at least in my view, they make Romanian sound solid and dreamy at the same time, with a mix of history and evolution: ?; a; ?; ?; and ?.
Years and years ago, when introducing Romanian to my American born son and subsequently while observing his linguistic evolution, it finally became clearer to me what ESL was at its core, and how it mattered, to a certain extent, in the formation of identity. That is, my son speaks Romanian as a second language, something that I never thought I would say, had I stayed in my country of birth.
As an American English non-native speaker, this matters to me because, if my son has the freedom to experiment with Romanian (create new words by being playful and/or operating in several languages – he was exposed to Latin and Spanish in school), then I, the foreigner, the immigrant, and the naturalized American woman must be respected for how I speak, write, and perform in my American English, and how my own Balkan origins have deeply influenced the forever changing/adapting of my multiple linguistic identity.
Still, this realization helped me accept my son’s imperfections and consider them just as beautiful and vital as any other achievements. Unless, of course, there is a major mistake, in which case I must intervene. (e.g., English does not distinguish among a noun’s genders, whereas in Romanian there are masculine, feminine, and neuters; sometimes, my son “interprets” a noun based on context, personal take, and other circumstantial factors. Changing a noun’s attributes also affects its agreement with an adjective, so, in such a case, I must tell him, this is a masculine noun, or this starts as a feminine noun in singular, but it switches to masculine when it is used in its plural form.)
However, out of respect of languages as a process, I will not correct my son’s interpretation of Romanian, especially when factoring the many miles that separate us geographically. So, if my son translates playfully a word and gives it a new possible life, however temporarily that may be, I am actually perfectly fine to accept that variation. (e.g., He used to say “a se expresa” instead of “a exprima,” that is, he translated “to express” by creating a portmanteau between the two verbs.)
Being intimate linguistically means being immersed in languages that are generous to allow someone to experiment and develop freely. For years, within our small family of three, we spoke a combination between American English and Romanian that morphed into Romanglish (just to add to what already exists as linguistic moral entities, i.e., Spanglish; Chinglish).
Finally, while a place of birth is random, interestingly, what we absorb from it is less so. That is, I did not choose to be born in Romania, but I brought my (“Dobrogean”) Romanian to the States willingly, learned to co-exist among linguistic spaces, and allowed these languages to continue to be. Unlike political and geographic borders, languages (both native and adopted) give birth to endless, intricate, and selfless universes.