How contact can shape a language: the case of Romanian

Dr. Kim Schulte (Universitat Jaume I)

Romanian, the easternmost Romance language, is primarily derived from Latin but has also incorporated a wide range of lexical material and grammatical structures from a number of other languages that it has been in contact with over the centuries.

In this lecture, different types of contact-induced features will be illustrated, showing how languages such as the pre-Romance substrate, Slavic, Hungarian, German, Turkish and Greek, but also French, have all left their mark on Romanian. An analysis of these features shows how different contact situations, brought about by different social and political circumstances, affect a language in different ways; conversely, this may also allow us to draw certain inferences about historical settings on the basis of contact-induced features that survive in a language.  

Dr. Kim Schulte teaches and researches the history of Romance languages, language contact, and translation. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and has contributed to a number of Europe-wide research projects, for instance at the Department of Linguistics of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Please direct any queries to Eszter Tarsoly (e.tarsoly@ucl.ac.uk)