Language is alive. When it stagnates, something is wrong. From my point of view, any change is therefore beneficial. And I am not referring only to vocabulary, which is the most visible layer, but also to more subtle transformations—phonetic ones, for instance. Interwar generations made a clear distinction in pronunciation between î and â. Words such as sânge(blood), stânjenel (iris), or zgârcit (stingy) were pronounced with a sound somewhere between â and ă, which gave the language a softer, more mellow tone. Even the sound z was often softened toward s.
Post-revolutionary generations, by contrast, introduced a certain aggressiveness into the sound e and altered sentence structure. Meanwhile, people under sixteen today display an elegance in their vowel pronunciation that I personally find seductive.
Vocabulary, of course, is the most exposed layer. The influx of English words from film and media signals an expansion of the language—one we should not fear. This phenomenon is not unique in history. A similar invasion occurred in the 1930s, after which Romanian grew richer and more flexible, eventually shedding excess weight. Many loanwords were adopted, absorbed, and Romanianized: meeting, single, band, pick-up (picap).
As for differences, they certainly exist, but I find the tendency toward unification far more powerful. A strong language is one with internal coherence, always ensured by the literary language and its rules. When rules are contested rather than applied, a language weakens. Even today, decades later, some people reject the use of â in spelling. Yet rules are not matters of debate; they are conventions, and conventions strengthen a language.
Conservatives have always existed—those who slow linguistic change without ever being able to stop it. Ultimately, a language’s evolution depends on education, even when that education is chaotic. The exit from the communist camp led to travel, which altered perspectives and ways of life for many Romanians. These experiences inevitably entered the language as well. And this is not a bad thing: calques, intuitive translations, and expressions imposed by social media usage are far more useful than the awkward preservation of archaic orthography.
In recent years, social media has played a significant role in unifying the language—largely a beneficial one. This is why expressions such as “I read it online” can be heard today both from someone with little formal education and from a scholar.
*Excerpt from an interview originally published by *
