Crearea limbilor naționale în secolul al XIX-lea. O privire asupra modelului francez și a celui românesc de normare a limbii
The birth of the national language in the 19th century. A perspective on the French model and on the Romanian normative language

Summary/Abstract: The paper proposes a study that investigates the creation of languages viewed in the context of the literary national Romanticism of the XIX ͭʰ century. Therefore, we chose to discuss two models of imagining the national language: the French and the Romanian pattern. For instance, the French language had developed from the vernacular Latin to which were added Gaelic and Germanic elements. In the XIX ͭʰ century, the official language in France was a dialect called by the linguists francien, a composed word from français and ancienne. Knowing this, we asked ourselves how this dialect was imposed, why was adopted this particular one and not any other idiom spoken in the rural areas of the country? What kind of connection was established between the varieties of dialects and the language that became the norm? These are some of the questions we intend to respond by writing this paper. The creation of the Romanian language followed a path slightly different compared to her Neo-Latin sister, the francien, because of differing cultural and social conditions developed in the Romanian Principalities. After 1830, it could be observed more often a constant preoccupation from the part of the Romanian writers for the specificity of a Romanian language that kept in its words the heritage of a Latin origin. Moreover, the folklore and the oral literature were discovered, a finding that played an important role in the construction of the national language. Also, the folklore embodied spiritual identity justifying the claim to self-determination of the Romanian people. Therefore, creating an unitary language was a necessity in the revolutionary and nation rising context of the XIX ͭ ͪ century. For this reason, the writers of the epoch considered important to emphasize the need for a national language that should be the expression of an unified and autonomous nation. So, linguists had to invent one by different manners such as borrowings, translations, derivation, neologisms, dialectal expressions etc. In other words, the birth of a nation became the birth of its language.

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