Romania's linguistic rivalry
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Although Hungarian and Roma speakers gained greater legal rights in Romania since the fall of communism, many are pushing for greater recognition, causing anger in sections of the Romanian-speaking community.
Although, according to the constitution, Romanian is the country's only official language, the law grants minority language groups rights if they make up over 20% of a region's population.
In practice this means the ethnic Hungarian minority, which makes up around 6% of Romania's population and is heavily concentrated in the Transylvanian area, get an education in their mother tongue from kindergarten to university and have their own representatives in local and national government.
But problems arise when Hungarian-speaking students hit the real world and try to find a job. Then they discover that their prospects are severely limited unless they are willing and able to talk the majority language.
University-educated ethnic Hungarian Karen Attila, who now works in a Romanian-speaking environment, agrees that this is a common problem. But she also says that a small minority within the 1.5 million-strong Hungarian community strongly disagree with her pragmatic decision to use Romanian in her professional life.
"Once in the street someone whispered to me: ‘You traitor of your nation!’ . And I understood that that person meant the Hungarian nation," she says.
The ethnic Roma - who officially number around 500,000, but unofficial figures put the figure at over 2 million - find themselves in an even tougher position, as unlike the Hungarians, the population is not concentrated geographically in one area of the country. Although entitled to obtain an education in the Romany language, a lack of teachers means this is often impossible.
One way to rectify this, says Roma Gabor Lajos, would be to make Romany an official EU language. "There are already 40-50 million Roma people in Europe. This is no longer a tribe, it is a nation," he argues.
The linguistic acrimony runs both ways. Within the Romanian-speaking majority there is a backlash against the rights being given to minority languages such as Hungarian and Roma.
Ioan Petre is one of a growing number of Romanian speakers who feels minority languages groups are being given preferential treatment, to the detriment of the majority of the population.
"I find it outrageous that the majority population is being forced to adjust to a minority, precisely because we don’t understand the language, habits and sometimes the different behaviour of the members of that minority. And we should not forget that the very identity of a country begins with its language, the official language. Let minorities speak their own languages, but at home,” he says.
The 21st February in International Mother Language Day. To find out about how minority languages are faring elsewhere in Europe see more reports in this Euranet This Week series:
