The Integration of Romanian Loan Verbs in the Bulgarian Dialect of Romania

Based on quantitative and contrastive analyses, this study explores the borrowing of verbs in the Bulgarian dialect of Brăneşti in Romania, how bilingual speakers integrate Romanian loan verbs, and why such integration strategies are adopted. For this purpose, the original colloquial data collected by the author in the 2010s, which included 93 Romanian loan verbs, are used. I argue that bilingual speakers choose either a direct or indirect insertion strategy, and in the latter case, they utilise the borrowed morpheme -’askă as an integration marker. The process is motivated by formal similarities and productivity.