Will Romanian Churches Save the Day? The Survival of the Romanian language in Chicago

by Costanza Vallicelli

Costanza Vallicelli is a MA student in Italian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the future, Costanza hopes to continue her graduate studies and become a professor, specializing in understudied Romance languages and heritage speakers. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023.

On Sunday mornings at Bethany Church, also known as Biserica Betania, a Romanian Pentecostal church in the northern suburbs of Chicago, dozens of people, most of them of Romanian origin, gather for the Sunday service. At the entrance of the church, people of all ages greet each other in a mix of English and Romanian. Once the service starts and the entire congregation joins together to celebrate their faith, their language of choice is one, and unified: Romanian. The church leaders conduct sermons in Romanian, the choir sings in Romanian, and members of the congregations pray aloud in Romanian. They might not be aware, but their religious practice is keeping the Romanian language alive in this immigrant community.

[1] By Holy Nativity Romanian Orthodox Church Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5636750723049939&set=pcb.5636751139716564

Churches like Bethany play a crucial role in maintaining the Romanian language in Chicago. Among the 70,000 Romanians living in the Chicago area[2], many ethnic Romanians are members of one of the fifteen active Romanian churches. Most of these churches are Pentecostal, Orthodox, or Baptist. These churches offer services in Romanian, their websites are both in English and Romanian, and they provide ample opportunities for people of Romanian background to gather and socialize in their heritage language. Some churches even organize Romanian language courses for children during Sunday School. Not only do churches promote Romanian culture within their local community, but they also connect people to the larger Romanian American community, by fostering interfaith communication and organizing nationwide conferences among Romanian congregations in North America. Churches also play a crucial role in maintaining connections with the homeland, by funding charity actions for churches and religious missions in Romania.

Several studies show that religion plays an important role in language maintenance. For example, Charles Ferguson (1982) noted that religious observance helped maintain languages after immigration, as in the case of German and Japanese immigrants in Brazil. While both groups are shifting to Brazilian Portuguese as their mother tongue, heritage languages are still used in their Christian and Buddhist religious programs and associated schools. Heinz Kloss (1966) and Marion Huffines (1986) observed that among German-Americans the most successful at maintaining the German language were separatist religious sects. Seon Lin Ding and Kim Leng Goh (2020)’s recent study on the role of religious practices in the maintenance of Hakka as a heritage language in Malaysia, found that those who use the language frequently during religious services maintain the language better than those who do not, and that intergenerational shift is slower in these individuals. They also found that those who attend religious services often maintain the language better compared to those who do not.

Bilingual Romanian-English sign in front of Saint Mary Romanian Orthodox Church (Chicago, IL)[3]

To explain why language and religion are so strongly intertwined, the scholar Sipra Mukherjee (2013) offers two fundamental reasons. The first is that language is of crucial importance for religion, as people engage with religion through language. Language is necessary for the expression and transmission of religion and religious ideas. It is through language that religion is passed on. Mukherjee (2013) even claims that religion exists in language, as reflected in the significance of religious languages and religious texts. The second reason is that both religion and language are markers of identity that express the beliefs and experiences of a community. They both change and evolve with society.

The language of religion (i.e., a language used in religious practices) may change over time, depending on the changing language ideology or language-religion ideology (cf. Fishman 2006:18). And there are significant changes occurring among Romanian-Americans: younger generations are shifting to the dominant language of society, English, and gradually losing their heritage language. This is part of a nationwide trend: according to the latest American Community Survey (2021)[4], 57.2% of people of Romanian origins above 5 years old only speak English, while 42.8% can speak another language (most likely Romanian). While this data does not provide any information about specific age groups it highlights that only less than half of the Romanian population in the United States still uses Romanian. The loss of Romanian mirrors the loss of many other heritage languages in the USA. Studies on heritage languages show that immigrant children in the USA tend to become English-dominant and even monolingual English speakers by the time they reach adolescence (Nesteruk 2010). This raises a follow-up question: How will this language shift affect the use of Romanian in religious practices?

Service at the Romanian Baptist Church of Chicago (Des Plaines, Illinois), the congregation is singing in Romanian[5].

Romanian Churches in Chicago, like many others around the world (cf. Ding & Goh 2020), now face an important dilemma: is it possible to keep their faith alive within the community without sacrificing their heritage language or will they have to transition to the dominant language of society to accommodate new generations of English-speaking Romanian Americans? Primarily, the mission of churches is the promotion of religion to a larger community and the assurance of intergenerational transmission of faith. Within this paradigm, these fundamental priorities surpass the importance of heritage languages and even traditional culture.

Churches though should be aware that they can make a difference in this pattern of language shift. Language practices in churches have an impact on the family language choice and the language of socialization among peers. Consequently, changes in the language of religion can have a strong influence on the language of the community. Upholding the use of Romanian as the primary language of religion is likely to support language maintenance in the long run. As in the case of German and Japanese speakers in Brazil, if the language continues to exist in public, religious spaces, it has a chance at survival, even if individuals do not use it in the home. It is only when Romanian will lose its role as a language of religion, that its future as a heritage language will be inexorably endangered.

Celebration for the 83^rd anniversary of Holy Nativity Romanian Orthodox Church, people are wearing traditional Romanian clothing (Chicago, IL)[6]

[1] By Biserica Betania Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/bisericabetaniachicago/photos/pb.100064435730407.-2207520000./1900969183352571/?type=3

[2] This is an estimate within the community https://romanianmissionchicago.org/our-history

[3] By Ion Bocuci on Google Maps Images https://goo.gl/maps/28Q5TgJrgsp5iRNr7

[4] https://data.census.gov/table?q=romanian&tid=ACSSPP1Y2021.S0201

[5] By Romanian Baptist Church of Chicago Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=478253877749738&set=pb.100066953900067.-2207520000.&type=3

[6] By Holy Nativity Romanian Orthodox Church Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5636750723049939&set=pcb.5636751139716564

References

Ding, Seon Lin & Goh, Kim Leng. 2020. The impact of religion on language maintenance and shift. Language in Society, 49(1): 31-59

Ferguson, Charles A. 1982. Religious factors in language spread. In Robert L. Cooper (ed.), Language spread: Studies in diffusion and social change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 95–106.

Fishman, Joshua A. 2006. A decalogue of basic theoretical perspectives of a sociology of language and religion. In Omoniyi & Fishman (eds), Explorations in the sociology of language and religion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 13–25.

Kloss, Heinz. 1966. German-American language maintenance efforts. In Joshua Fishman et al. (eds.), Language loyalty in the United States: The maintenance and perpetuation of non-English mother tongues by American ethnic and religious groups. The Hague: Mouton, 206–52.

Huffines, Marion L. 1986. Language-Maintenance Efforts Among German Immigrants and Their Descendants in the United States. In Frank Trommler & Joseph McVeigh (eds.), America and the Germans, Volume 1: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred Year History--Immigration, Language, Ethnicity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 241–250.

Mukherjee, Sipra. 2013. Reading language and religion together. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 220: 1–6.

Nesteruk, Olena. 2010. Heritage language maintenance and loss among the children of Eastern European immigrants in the USA. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 31(3): 271–286.

Posted in: Chicago,Costanza Vallicelli,immigration,Romanian,Romanian-Americans