Rumänisch im deutschen Migrationskontext
Abstract The migration of Romanian nationals to Germany has a rather long history, but it has gained intensity in the last fifty years. There are almost 780.000 Romanians now living in Germany making them the second-largest group of foreign EU citizens residing in this country. If we also include naturalised citizens as well as the “old” and “new” ethnic German immigrants (the German Romanians), the total number of immigrants originating from Romania exceeds one million individuals. Despite this, migratory linguistic studies are almost non-existent. This article examines the sociolinguistic situation of Romanian as an extraterritorial language in Germany and the discourse behaviour of Romanian migrants to which it correlates. Special attention is paid to the second generation. The focus is on the following aspects: the acquisition of the language of origin and the territorial language, the migrants’ language competence in Romanian compared to their language competence in German, the use of these languages by domains and the translinguistic markers in discourse. The empirical study — which is preceded by a brief description of Romanian migration to Germany — is based on data obtained using qualitative and quantitative methods.