Romanian linguists split over dialect loss as AI reshapes the language

On August 31, Romania marks its annual Language Day, and this year the occasion arrives amid a sharper argument than usual. The Romanian language, Latin in skeleton but layered with centuries of borrowed vocabulary, has absorbed French cadences a hundred years ago, English syntax after 1989, and now the clipped hybrid of internet abbreviations, anglicisms, and emoji grammar that characterizes digital communication. The Romanian Academy's dictionary adds dozens of new words each edition, and the additions provoke opposing verdicts: some linguists call it degradation, others insist it is the ordinary metabolism of a living language.

Historian Adrian Cioroianu, speaking to reporters last week, framed the question in geological time. He predicted that in two thousand years the planet will speak far fewer languages than it does today, and he described the erosion of regional dialects as an inevitable global pattern rather than a specifically Romanian failure. Writer Doina Ruști disagreed. She argued that regionalisms function as linguistic reserves, available to enrich the literary standard when writers choose to draw on them. Ruști cited Ion Luca Caragiale, who brought the Transylvanian term *Paști* into wider circulation through his plays, demonstrating that regional vocabulary can migrate into the canon when a skilled writer sponsors it.

Artist Dan Perjovschi told the *Times* he mourns the loss. Contemporary life, he said, is organized around global brands and digital platforms, and the result is a flattening of regional variation. The same coffee-shop names appear in Bucharest and Timișoara; the same English-derived tech jargon circulates on Romanian social media. Perjovschi sees the process as irreversible but lamentable. Writer and politician Varujan Vosganian offered a comparative case. Armenians in Moldova, he noted, preserved their language through geographic isolation, but among the descendants of Armenian genocide survivors who settled in Romania, only five percent still speak Armenian. Vosganian attributed the difference to migration and the diversification of social relationships, which he described as the primary solvents of linguistic particularity.

The debate extends into the classroom. Cioroianu argued that high-school textbooks should include the seventeenth-century chroniclers Miron Costin and Grigore Ureche, whose Romanian prose predates the French-influenced reforms of the nineteenth century. He suggested that contemporary writers could adapt these texts for adolescent readers, much as Shakespeare's plays are now taught in modernized editions. The proposal rests on the assumption that students need direct contact with older forms of the language to understand its architecture, but it has not yet been adopted by the Ministry of Education.

Another front in the argument concerns corporate jargon. Cioroianu dismissed it as ephemeral, predicting that each generation's professional slang will fade as quickly as it appeared. Ruști agreed that specialized vocabularies have always existed and said their long-term influence on the standard language is negligible. Perjovschi was less sanguine, expressing concern that institutional jargon now saturates public discourse in ways that earlier professional registers did not. Vosganian took a middle position, describing jargon as a communication tool specific to certain occupations rather than a threat to the language as a whole.

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The influence of artificial intelligence on Romanian writing has introduced a new variable. Automated text-generation tools, widely used in journalism and marketing, tend to normalize certain grammatical errors and to favor a narrow range of syntactic structures. Linguists have not yet published systematic studies of the phenomenon, but anecdotal evidence suggests that AI-generated Romanian prose is contributing to the homogenization of written style, particularly in online media. The Romanian Academy has not issued a formal position on the matter.

Regional dialects, once sustained by geographic isolation and limited mobility, are now under pressure from mass media and internal migration. The Moldavian dialect, the Transylvanian variants, and the Banat speech patterns are still spoken by older generations, but younger Romanians increasingly converge on a Bucharest-inflected standard. Ruști argued that this convergence represents a loss of expressive resources, while Cioroianu maintained that it reflects the ordinary dynamics of language change in a connected society.

The Romanian language evolved from Vulgar Latin spoken in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and it retains a core Latin vocabulary that distinguishes it from its Slavic neighbors. French influence peaked in the nineteenth century, when Romanian intellectuals modeled their prose on Parisian literary style. English influence accelerated after 1989, when Romania opened to Western markets and media. The current wave of digital borrowing is the third major lexical shift in a century and a half, and it is proceeding faster than either of its predecessors.

The question of what constitutes acceptable Romanian remains contested. The Romanian Academy, the official arbiter of linguistic norms, updates its dictionary periodically to reflect usage, but the updates themselves become occasions for argument. Some commentators accuse the Academy of capitulating to error; others accuse it of resisting necessary change. The Academy has not responded to requests for comment.

Language Day, established in 1990, was intended to celebrate the unity of Romanian across its geographic and political divisions. This year the occasion has instead highlighted the divisions within the linguistic community itself. Cioroianu, Ruști, Perjovschi, and Vosganian represent four different positions on the same question: whether the changes now underway represent evolution or decay. None of them disputed the fact of change. The argument is over how to interpret it.