"Bridge-uri, router-e si switch-uri" : On Romanian Computer Language

Abstract

The influence of English upon Romanian, which is not a new phenomenon, has become extensive in recent years. Words of English origin can be found, in greater or smaller numbers, in absolutely all Romanian newspapers and magazines, in advertisements, they can be heard on TV, can be seen as shop names or used in graffiti. The paper analyses terms that have been borrowed from English in the Romanian computer language. The data discussed have been collected from three issues, belonging to three different years, selected at random, of a Romanian computer magazine. One can easily notice that the rate of Anglicisms does not decrease with time, that some terms are totally unadapted and felt to be ’foreignisms’, while others display various degrees of morphological adaptation.