Rolul internetului în reconfigurarea şi consolidarea comunităţii aromânilor
The Role of Internet in Reconfiguring and Strengthening the Aromanian Community

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to examine the effects of Internet use among Aromanian community members. The argumentation begins naturally by defining the term “community” and then continues by presenting some benchmarks of the Aromanians. A virtual community is made of people who have something significant in common, such as a hobby, a political opinion, a religious belief, a professional relationship, a cultural identity or a language. The Aromanian virtual community was established by means of Internet and has developed in a relatively short period of time, and in the latest 13 years the communication means used have contributed to the reconfiguration and even to the strengthening of the Aromanian community everywhere. Since their arrival in Romania and up to this day, for eight decades, the Aromanians have not obtained any specific duty to their ethnicity. There are no schools where their children learn the language, no church where the sermons could be in Aromanian. They could not use their mother tongue in the media. To these elements, their being spread in cities as well as the large number of mixed marriages, have bun added leading to the de-nationalization and assimilation of a large percentage of their number. In Romania, the Aromanians are not included in government programs on ethnic relations, do not have representatives in the Council of National Minorities, in other words they are not considered a minority, either the Aromanian language being considered by officials, as a dialect of Romanian, not a different language at all. The Aromanians in Romania and beyond, have said repeatedly that they will simply keep the language, song, wear, customs and traditions. The Aromanians require education in their mother tongue, and the sermons in churches in Aromanian as proposed by the Council of Europe through the Recommendation No 1333 of 1997. Members of the Aromanian Association from Romania and other countries such as France, Germany, Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, but also in USA, Canada and Australia have initiated specific Aromanian discussion groups, they have built dozens of websites with specific content in the Aromanian language, launched the first radio and television stations broad-casting significantly only online and made their presence felt significantly on social sites worldwide. The research aims to identify the features of the communication tools used by the Aromanian community and to highlight their implications affirming the cultural identity of Aromanian.

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