Anca-Diana Bibiri

The role of religion in shaping immigrant integration is highlighted by a growing body of research, emphasizing its potential to provide a social network and a system of meaning. Using data collected by in-depth interviews, we examine the impact of immigration on the religious beliefs and practices of legal Romanian immigrants in Belgium. Our research focuses on the migrants’ perspective on religion as a psychological and social support after migration. Data analysis indicates that the migration experience generates deep transformations in the migrants’ cultural identity concerning individual beliefs and religious practices, significantly diminishing those practices after migration. Besides the differences generated by socio-demographic variables such as age, gender, education level, and economic status, these transformations are mainly caused by the characteristics of the host country’s sociocultural environment and the pragmatic interests guiding the migrants’ lives. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between migration, cultural identity, and religion, providing valuable insights for stakeholders responsible for migrant integration.

This paper focuses on an analysis of the intonation patterns of different types of vocatives in Romanian language. We present the main characteristics of the tonal patterns observed in the vocative constructions instances of isolated vocatives and contexts in which vocatives occur in different positions: initial, middle, and final. Our analysis, in the framework of AM phonology with ToBI conventions, reveals that most of isolated vocatives are realized as L+H*(!)H% (vocative chant), and L+H* L% (insistent call). For non-isolated vocatives the most frequent contours are labeled as L+H* L% and H+L* L%. Cross-linguistically, our findings show that Romanian vocatives display the same pattern as other Romance languages.

The Romanian language is characterized by an extremely prolific paradigm of greeting and farewell formulae, used in various communicational contexts and able to fulfil complex communicative functions. Starting from the assumption that the selection of greeting and farewell formulae performed by the speakers is determined by extralinguistic factors such as their educational background, professional status, social relationships and the like, this study attempts a description of the variation registered by the use of greetings and farewells in contemporary Romanian, in formal and informal communication contexts, in relation to three sociolinguistic variables: age, gender and level of education. The resulting analysis indicates that the subjects’ age and level of education generate the highest variation at a formal level, whereas their gender is, on the other hand, responsible for differences at a functional level, as the respective greeting and farewell formulae display different degrees of affective load.