Ciubotă, Viorel - Nicolescu, Gheorge - Ţucă, Cornel (szerk.): Jurnal de operaţiuni al Comandamentului Trupelor din Transilvania (1918-1921) 2. (Satu Mare, 1998)
Istorie şi Geografie Istorică / Geschichte und Landeskunde / Történelem és országismeret - Regiuni de frontieră şi zone de contact / Grenzreionen und Kontakträume / Határvidékek és kapcsolódási területek
292 Luca Cal vi «... a literary language is a type of “roof’ intended to cover a particular ethno-linguistic territory and to unify it into a single whole for which more or less one linguistic norm is essential [...]. Often, a literary language appears to be super-dialectal, although it is based on one or two (very rarely, three) concrete dialects of the ethnic language [...]. We cannot lose sight of the fact, however, that alongside a literary language there often continue to function older forms of the ethnic language [...] dialects or territorial subdialects, the speakers of which stand at various distances from the common literary language. Most speakers of dialects on which the literary language is based generally perceive the common literary standard as “theirs”. Speakers of peripheral dialects, however, are not only aware of their distance from such a standard, they perhaps feel somewhat alienated from it [...]. Thus [...] for one dialectical territory this “roof’ is close-fitting”; for another it is weak and “leaks” [...]. It appears that Europe, includng the Slavic world, is gradually moving toward a new literary-linguistic environment. Along with the common literary language which unites the nation anf the whole ethnic group, local phenomena in the form of regional literary languages are being permitted where the need and conditions arise. Hence, it is not necessary to juxtapose these two literary-linguistic phenomena [..]. On the contrary, the local literary language may complement well the literary-linguistic life of a particular ethnic group» (DULICENKO 1996: 3-4). This situation of the Rusyn question, simplified due to the limits of this paper, is anyhow very useful to find out some general consideration about the borderland identities, confirming the fact that it is from the particular that we can trace the explications for the whole, and not always vice-versa. Nowadays the Rusyn question is a typical example of coexistence of the double kind of “submerged” nationality, i. e; nationality from above and nationality from below. Under the term “nationality from above” we mean the status of nationality or of national minority given by a State authority for some purpose, perhaps cultural, or, often, political, as we can understand the politics of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary or Yugoslavia. A “nationality from below” is the result of the efforts of a given intelligencija, which, at a certain moment of its cultural development, feels the need or simply wants to express itself as a particular of the whole an not as a part of another particularity. The borderland identity has in itself both the identity factors we pointed out above and traces its own particularity in its being, at the same time, itself and the part of the whole from which it wants to be distincted, depending on the needs. We only want to point out that being a minority means often being an elite, but, in order to be a minority, a majority is needed, an this last one must not always be opposite to the minority. For this reason we don’t understand the need and the quest for the status of national minorities, as if the definition of ethnic minorities could decrease the importance of the social group: a borderland identity is itself, the Other and the Neighbour, i.
