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In our “House Europe” the exchange of ideas is going on intensively and the multi-cultural societies are in continuous transformation. An interesting example for cultural transfer in a multi-lingual and multi-confessional society is the reception of the St. Martin’s Day combined with the lantern procession organized by the German schools in Transylvania. The schools with German teaching language in Romania became a practice area for intercultural communication. Since 1997, first grade students at German schools in Romania learn from a new reading primer. One of the reading passages, “Our Lantern Festival”, initiated the spreading of a feast which had not been popular before neither with the German speaking minority of the Transylvanian Saxons, nor with the Romanian majority. The Lantern Festival is closely linked to the celebration of St. Martin, who is a European figure of high symbolic power. We can allege that the cultural diversity is an additional value for Europe. In the era of globalization, when migration processes and cultural hybridization are getting more intense, the intercultural communication has to adjust its inherited paradigm to the contemporary dynamics and heterogeneity of cultures.
The main theme “Identity and Alterity” requires a comprehensive view over the literary personages who are characterized by their backgrounds, their language and their food culture as well. Therefore, an interdisciplinary extending of perspectives should enhance the mere literary analysis. For this purpose the fields of study Sociolinguistics and Gastrosophy (a still insufficiently acknowledged humane discipline) are advisable. The sociolinguistic perspective illustrates the acquired or renegotiated spiritual home and identity of the personages within their language, whereas the gastrosophic perspective investigates their identity considering specific eating habits. The migration background of the reviewed author functions as a mirror which reflects and conveys these aspects in an inventive way. The paper intends to demonstrate to what extend the suggested approaches are suitable for analyzing a transcultural text.
An essential factor for the naming practice lies in the language(s) spoken by that certain family. In the nowadays very common multilingual families in Transylvania, the so called ‚mixed marriages’, the linguistic contact also becomes manifest in the field of onomatology. Out of the vast subject matter, four aspects will be approached: the decline of the tradition of naming a child after a parent; naming practices following ethnic reasons in order to denote a certain identity; naming preferences for international names in mixed families; the increasing diversification and inter-culturality of name-giving due to globalization and the impact of social media. Concrete examples – based on bap tis mal registers of the local Lutheran Church – illustrate the monitored trends.
Inspired by the general theme Interculturality in language and literature. Assimilation – distinction – exchange, the contribution offers a short survey over the linguistic situation at the schools with instruction in German language in Romania and outlines the evolution, problems and perspectives in this domain. The long tradition of the church-sponsored, Lutheran German schools of the Transylvanian Saxons belongs to history. The present linguistic situation at schools with instruction in German language in Romania is a totally changed one and all participants are facing huge challenges. Very briefly, current aspects of the linguistic situation (school types, staff, students, acquisition of the language of instruction, multilingualism, language competence, phenomena of language contact, intercultural learning etc.) as well as possible actions in the field of multilingual didactics and educational politicy are pointed up.