Greetings and farewells in contemporary Romanian: A sociolinguistic approach

Abstract

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.