Czech language minority in the South-eastern Romanian Banat

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.