LANGUAGE AWARENESS AND LINGUISTIC INTERFERENCE IN THE DISCOURSE OF ROMANIAN IMMIGRANTS IN SPAIN

Romanian immigration in Spain reached its peak towards the end of the 2000's putting the Romanians on the first place amongst the immigrant communities in Spain and thus creating the proper environment for language contact between Romanian and Spanish. This linguistic reality has been studied only recently but conclusions arising from this research already account for the existence of a new variety of Romanian, lately referred to as Rumanol. According to the first studies that dealt with the topic, Rumanol was a mixed variety used by Romanian immigrants living in Spain and characterised by linguistic interferences. However, some recent papers have shown that from a quantitative point of view this is highly debatable since the amount of interference seems to be very low. The present paper combines this quantitative criterion with a sociological view, by firstly investigating the degree to which Romanian immigrants might be aware of Rumanol as a distinct variety of Romanian, and secondly by aiming at identifying any possible correlation between the awareness level and the amount of interference present in their discourse.