Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Fachbereich 10
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien
Abteilung Linguistik

Politeness in Romania

Address Forms

Rebecca Leugner

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ... 1

2. Definitions ... 2

3. General Information on Romanian Pronouns of Address ... 3

4. The Questionnaire ... 7

4.1. Concept ... 7
4.2. The Respondents ... 8
4.3. Romanian and German Responses to the Questionnaire ... 9
4.4. The Governing Principle: Power vs. Solidarity ... 11

5. Insecurity: Playing it Safe ... 16

6. The Role of Status ... 17

6.1. Appellatives Revealing Marital Status: Miss/Fräulein/Domnisoara ... 17
6.2. The Expression of Differences in Status ... 20

7. Conclusion ... 21

8. References ... 22

1. Introduction

In this term paper I will examine the use of address forms and especially the pronouns of address in the Romanian language. The main part of this paper consists of the evaluation of a questionnaire on the use of Romanian pronouns and its comparison to an equivalent questionnaire on German pronouns. In my analysis I want to investigate the hypothesis that Germans lean more towards the principle of “solidarity”, while for Romanians “power” is the decisive factor for the choice of address forms. This thesis will be extended by saying that for Romanians not only “power” but “status” in general is a very important feature of communication. To show this I will compare the courtesy titles Miss, Fräulein, and the Romanian equivalent domnisoara, and provide further examples illustrating the importance of expressing social status in the Romanian language.
I chose this topic for a number of reasons. What first gave me the idea was that in Leo Hickey and Miranda Stewart’s book Politeness in Europe Romania is not included. The chapter “Eastern Europe” only contains Estonia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. I felt that there was a gap to be filled. So I called my paper “Politeness in Romania” following the pattern of their book. What encouraged me was that I can speak, read, and understand Romanian well enough to dare working with Romanian academic texts. My interest for the topic grew even more when I found out that on Romanian politeness there is relatively little literature available in German or English. I wanted to add something to this rather small assortment, hoping to raise interest for the Romanian language, especially since Romania has become a member of the European Union on the 1st of January 2007. The special topic of address forms I chose on the one hand because the presentation I did on the article by Roger Brown and Albert Gilman “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity” motivated me to do so. On the other hand, the Romanian language provides a great field of study when it comes to pronouns of address because it has a remarkable diversity of address forms. I found this especially interesting since being a German I am used to the two-dimensional scale of “siezen” and “duzen”, but in Romanian, there are quite a number of nuances in between these two. Above that, the Romanian language has several different terms (e.g. politicos, cumsecade, cuviincios, de treaba, de omenie, cu bun sim) to translate the English term polite (cf. Roceric 1995:101), which might already imply that it is a fruitful field of investigation for a term paper on politeness.
All examples, glosses, translations, charts, etc. that occur in this paper without a given reference were done by myself.

2. Definitions

Starting out I will provide definitions of some of the main terms that I will base my paper on, namely “politeness”, “formal”, “informal”, and “familiar”. Further terms such as “politeness pronoun”, “power”, and “solidarity” will be defined later on.
There is a wide range of definitions for the term “politeness”, which makes it hard to decide for one to work with. “The basic substance of the notion [politeness] is that it consists of mutually shared forms of consideration for others” (Watts 2003:50). For a definition to base this paper on, I will use one that describes the term in a general sense and does not lead away too much from the basic substance. I will understand politeness as “the set of social values which instructs interactants to consider each other by satisfying shared expectations” (Sifianou 1992, cited by Watts 2003:53). Talking about forms of address, the term can be confined: Being “polite” when it comes to the use of address forms means “getting the linguistic expression of social distance right as far as your addressee is concerned” (Holmes 2001:271).
Talking about pronouns of address, I will use expressions such as “more formal pronoun” or “more informal pronoun”. Referring to the German language with “formal pronoun” I will always mean Sie, with “informal pronoun” I mean du. For the Romanian language the matter is more complicated. So these terms need to be defined in a more general way. “Formal” is a characteristic of or befitting a person in authority (cf. AHD 2003) that adheres to traditional standards of correctness without casual, contracted, or colloquial forms and that has an impersonal touch to it (cf. KLUGE 2002:309). So “formal pronouns” are normally used to strangers or persons of “superiority” and they are often seen to be more polite than “informal pronouns”. Such “informal pronouns” foster a warm or friendly and informal atmosphere (cf. AHD 2003), and are used in unofficial or casual contexts. I will use the term “informal” interchangeably with “familiar”, whereas a “familiar pronoun” is one that is used for friendships, intimacy, or persons with mutual interests or affections.

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