Gumuțeasca orGomuțeasca (sometimes referred to aslimba gumuțească, "Gumutseascan language",[a] orlimba de sticlă, "the glass language") is anargot (a speech form spoken by a group of people to prevent outsiders from understanding them) used exclusively in thecommune ofMărgău inCluj County,Romania. The people of Mărgău traditionally worked withglass for centuries, makingmirrors,windows andreligious icons and selling them to other parts of the country such asBucharest, thecapital of Romania, orBrăila andConstanța.[1][2][3] The people of Mărgău wandered all over the country to practice their profession,[1] and in order to warn each other of possible dangerous people on the way to cities[2] or to be able to putprices to their glass products without outsiders being able to understand them,[1] they invented Gumuțeasca as a form of speech that only they could understand.[1][2]
Although Gumuțeasca has been spoken for more than 100 years[1] and it has been passed from generation to generation,[3] today only a few people continue to speak it. This is because the practice of the traditional profession of Mărgău has been reduced considerably and because part of the local population has left the place.[2] The emergence ofinsulated glazing and glass-manufacturing companies also caused the people of Mărgău to lose customers.[3] Some linguists from Cluj County have defined the argot as a "rural professional argot", which would be the only one of this type known in Romania. Gheorghe Braica, formerprotopope ofCluj-Napoca and a native of Mărgău, explained in hisMonografia Mărgăului ("Monograph of Mărgău") that Gumuțeasca first developed at the base of theApuseni Mountains and that it spread from there to nearby villages.[1]
Gumuțeasca has thousands of words and a richvocabulary that is very different from standardRomanian.[3] Some examples of the argot are:[1][2][3]
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