A Chronicler Hath a Facebook Page: Enregistering “Old Romanian” Online

Abstract

Drawing on Agha’s (2003, 2005) theory of enregisterment, our research is concerned with the linguistic practices through which “old Romanian” as an imagined variety is perceived and represented online by educated non-linguists contributing to the Letopiseț (“chronicle”) Facebook page. The administrator and the community gathered around this page write humorously about current political or social events using, more or less competently, an approximation of 17th-century Romanian – an endeavour similar to the one found on Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog (Bryant 2010) and other pages. The purpose of our paper is to analyse how “old Romanian” is enregistered as such and what are the salient linguistic and cultural features indexically linked to the idea of “archaicity”. We contend that, on the Letopiseț Facebook page, “old Romanian” is enregistered in three main ways: by using a set of archaic graphic, morphosyntactic and lexical features (either authentic or invented by the administrator); by using dialectal features, thought of as old; and by using quotes and pseudo-quotes (Minugh 1999) from old Romanian texts. In the end, we discuss a few possible reasons for using “old Romanian” online.