Is the EU Accession a Critical Juncture for Romania’s Language Policy?

Abstract

In the course of history, Romania’s Transylvania was the home of a number of different ethnolinguistic groups, including Hungarians, Romanians, Germans, Jews and Roma among others. After the First World War, and particularly during the last decades of the communist regime, however, pressures to create a highly centralized, uniform, monolingual state with the Romanian language as its only official language have largely increased. This uniformizing French style Jacobin language policy became a key element of the Romanian state tradition, supported by the make-up of its institutions and legal provisions. As a consequence, the languages of Romania have been ordered hierarchically with the official Romanian language outranking the different minority languages, including Hungarian, German, Roma, Ukrainian, Slovakian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ruthenian, Russian and so on. In this framework, the minority languages could be used at a local and regional level only. However, minority language use was restricted by language laws, thresholds and other hampering measures. The country’s accession to the European Union (EU) in 2007 has been celebrated as a critical juncture challenging the canonical top-down Jacobin state tradition and its exclusive language policy with respect to the minority languages. The analysis presented in this paper will weigh the pro’s and contra’s of this claim. It will be concluded that although minority languages have received more recognition under the new EU order than under former Romanian nationalizing regimes, like the preceding post-communist and communist rules, the implementation of a permissive minority language policy still shows serious deficiencies. It will be concluded that the accession of Romania to the EU can hardly be referred to as a critical juncture concerning its language policy.