Romanian in Israel: nostalgia, attachment, and family language policy in a small heritage-language community

Research on family language policy (FLP) has addressed low-prestige and weakly supported languages, but rarely communities in absolute demographic decline. In the case of the Romanian-born, Romanian-speaking first generation in Israel, such decline is evident, and when this research was conducted, no FLP study had examined Romanian-origin families. This paper analyses nine semi-structured interviews in relation to Spolsky’s tripartite model, Fishman’s Reversing Language Shift and ethnolinguistic vitality theory, as well as Curdt-Christiansen and Huang’s model for comparison. Domain contraction, uneven management and second-generation shift largely match expectations. Emotional attachment to Romanian proves widespread, yet since attached speakers diverge in outcome, it is not sufficient to explain the differences. Proceeding from this point, I identify nostalgic stance as what varies between speakers, an active/passive continuum determined by temporal orientation, grammatical construction of agency and locus of responsibility. In the case of the four speakers who could be placed, an active stance accompanies their continued use of Romanian, which the criteria partly draw on, but not transmission. Finally, affect is discernible in practices, beliefs, and management, while nostalgia, the part of it that varies, does not align with management strategy. Whether the continuum extends beyond this corpus remains open.