Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat
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Karolína Vyskočilová
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.
| 1830 | 1850 | 1869 | 1880 | 1890 | 1894 | 1900 | 1910 | 1925 | 1928 | 1928 | 1937 | 1948[15] | 1986 | 1991 | 2002 | 2011 | |
| Bígr | 266 | 215 | 225 | 238 | 282 | 302 | 325 | 373 (6) | 400 | 453 (0) | 586 (0) | 610 | 786 | 380 | 360 (10) | 229 | 146 |
| Eibentál | 356 | 469 | 552 | 597 | 720 | 848 (166) | 700 | 976 (139) | 1100 (140) | 700 [16] | 681 | 600 | 600 (100) | 500 | 290 | ||
| Gerník | 469 | 564 | 820 | 913 | 1029 | 1250 | 1155 | 1048 (23) | 1030 | 1078 (24) | 1389 (0) | 1400 | 1153 | 860 | 910 (10) | 512 | 280 |
| Svatá Helena | 388 | 313 | 469 | 461 | 757 | 627 | 766 | 814 (3) | 820 | 916 (0) | 960 (0) | 1000 | 1170 | 750 | 800 (10) | 507 | 312 |
| Rovensko | 237 | 216 | 321 | 410 | 418 | 460 | 386 | 355 (5) | 350 | 350 (0) | 415 (0) | 425 (1) | 437 | 235 | 235 (5) | 150 | 68 |
| Šumice | 123 | 202 | 263 | 416[17] | 376 | 427 (3) | 430 | 510 (0) | 660 (0) | 660 (1) | 450 | 340 | 205 (0) | 143 | 80 | ||
| Nová Ogradena | 151 | 145 | 189 | 259 | 237 (83) | 300 (140) | 249 (100) | 240 (77) | 141 |
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space: introduction
- Part I: The Czech sociolinguistic space in the Czech Republic
- The Czech language of Jews in Přemyslid Bohemia of the eleventh to fourteenth century
- The Others in the Czech Republic: their image and their languages
- Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space
- Czech Sign Language in contemporary Czech society
- Part II: The Czech sociolinguistic space abroad
- Texas Czech Legacy Project: documenting the past and present for the future
- Czech immigrant dialects in the Northern Caucasus and Western Siberia
- Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat
- Transnationalism and language maintenance: Czech and Slovak as heritage languages in the Southeastern United States
- Book Review
- Patrick Studer and Iwar Werlen: Linguistic diversity in Europe: current trends and discourses
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space: introduction
- Part I: The Czech sociolinguistic space in the Czech Republic
- The Czech language of Jews in Přemyslid Bohemia of the eleventh to fourteenth century
- The Others in the Czech Republic: their image and their languages
- Romani in the Czech sociolinguistic space
- Czech Sign Language in contemporary Czech society
- Part II: The Czech sociolinguistic space abroad
- Texas Czech Legacy Project: documenting the past and present for the future
- Czech immigrant dialects in the Northern Caucasus and Western Siberia
- Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat
- Transnationalism and language maintenance: Czech and Slovak as heritage languages in the Southeastern United States
- Book Review
- Patrick Studer and Iwar Werlen: Linguistic diversity in Europe: current trends and discourses
