The rediscovery and reconfiguration of ethnic identities in postsocialist Romania raises, in the case of the historical minorities, the question of the status of bilingual speakers who today face a double challenge. On the one hand, the attitude towards their mother tongue has changed as compared to that of the previous generations, against the background of the expansion of the obligatory public education system in the Romanian language and of education within Romanian culture. On the other hand, the minor cultures of the small ethnic communities (from the nation states that emerged in the Balkans in the modern age) are strongly affected by the consequences of the globalization process, a process that levels differences, changes the frameworks of alterity, and modifies perceptions regarding the importance of preserving the cultural heritage of less visible communities. Their linguistic identity cannot compete with the dominant languages and is affected by the influence of the (American) English language and of the culture it promotes, which in a certain sense is a mass culture with a levelling effect. In this report, I attempt to give a picture of these interactions and developments. This is a summary of a case study on the Tatar language in Dobruja carried out within the research project “Cultural Heritage and Identity Dynamics in the Tatar Community of Dobroudja”.