ДОКУМЕНТОВАЊЕ РОМСКОГ ДЕЧИЈЕГ ГОВОРА
DOCUMENTING ROMANI CHILD LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at describing the ongoing project of Romani child language documentation and creating a corpus of children’s narratives in Romani. The project is focused on the Gurbet variety of Romani spoken in Eastern Serbia. The data were collected in November 2017 and May 2018 in the town of Knjaževac and the nearby village of Minićevo. Twenty elementary-school children aged 7 to 14 participated in the study. The method of open-ended interview was applied in data collection with questions oriented towards autobiographical narratives and traditional culture. The material was audio and video recorded and stored in the Digital Archive of the Institute for Balkans Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. The paper is focused on the importance of creating a corpus of children’s narratives in Romani as one of the affirmative measures of language protection and maintenance. The project in question is presented in the context of (potential) language vulnerability of the Gurbet Romani in Eastern Serbia and discussed in relation to the intergenerational language transmission. Additionally, some of the linguistic topics relevant for the research of the collected material are presented.

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