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Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat

  • Karolína Vyskočilová EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 9, 2016

Abstract

This article concerns a Czech language minority living in the south-western Romanian region of Banat. First an overview of the situation of Banatian Czech speakers is given, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, followed by a sociolinguistically focused description of the linguistic conditions present in this language island. Next, the article examines seven syntactic and morphosyntactic structures found in Bígr Czech, namely three word order phenomena, use of the indefinite determiner, totality quantifiers and prepositional phenomena. Using the specialized corpora, BANAT for Banatian Czech (BC) and the ORAL corpus for Common Czech (CC), the BC and CC structures are compared to reveal that some of the investigated features previously assigned as characteristic for Bígr Czech are equally present in Common Czech spoken in the Czech Republic.

References

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Appendix: The population growth in Banatian Czech villages

This is based on Vyskočilová (2012: 69–70). For a more detailed list of sources with a short historical commentary see the original article, only the most important notes have been included by footnotes.

Note: If a cell contains two values, the first is the total population in the village and in parentheses is the population of a nationality other than Czech. Numbers given in italics come from sources whose measurement has been questioned in the literature.

1830185018691880189018941900191019251928192819371948[15]1986199120022011
Bígr266215225238282302325373 (6)400453 (0)586 (0)610786380360 (10)229146
Eibentál356469552597720848 (166)700976 (139)1100 (140)700 [16]681600600 (100)500290
Gerník4695648209131029125011551048 (23)10301078 (24)1389 (0)14001153860910 (10)512280
Svatá Helena388313469461757627766814 (3)820916 (0)960 (0)10001170750800 (10)507312
Rovensko237216321410418460386355 (5)350350 (0)415 (0)425 (1)437235235 (5)15068
Šumice123202263416[17]376427 (3)430510 (0)660 (0)660 (1)450340205 (0)14380
Nová Ogradena151145189259237 (83)300 (140)249 (100)240 (77)141
Published Online: 2016-2-9
Published in Print: 2016-3-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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