Morphological reduction in Aromanian

This paper presents the findings of a study examining the extent of linguistic attrition in Aromanian. In particular, the study focuses on derivational morphology and it examines reduction in the use of a group of suffixes by three age groups in the small town of Philippiada as well as loss in the allomorphic variation and in the range of semantic functions these suffixes perform. The results manifest a steady decline in the awareness of known items amongst the youngest members of the community, thereby showing that Aromanian is used progressively less and less by the speakers. The findings also demonstrate that functions which these morphemes originally performed are dying out, especially among the youngest segment of the population examined, while other functions are gradually being replaced by analytical forms.