Graiul vlah în școlile din Serbia răsăriteană: provocări și perspective
The Vlach Speech in the Schools of Eastern Serbia: Challenges and Perspectives

Summary/Abstract: The Vlachs are a minority of Eastern Serbia closely related ethnographically and linguistically to the Romanians, and speaking an archaic variant of the Romanian language, with a large share of Serbian neologisms. The Vlachs have a multiple, contextual and contested identity, some of them identifying with the Romanian nation, some with the Serbian one, and others opting for a local Vlach identity, different from the Romanian one, which has been reinforced lately by the pro-Vlach activists. The aim of our paper is to thoroughly present the linguistic situation of the Vlachs, with a special emphasis on the gap in the intergenerational transmission of the language, to take a look at the curriculum design and development for teaching Vlach in the schools of Eastern Serbia, and to present the first Vlach textbook, The Vlach speech with elements of national culture, published in 2014. We are focusing on Vlach corpus planning and acquisition planning, but also take a look at the recent introduction of Romanian language classes in the region. Despite the specialists’ opinion that Vlach is only an archaic variant of Romanian, we are witnessing its transformation into a language of its own, which is not a new phenomenon in Eastern Europe, and which deserves the entire attention of both linguists and policy makers. In spite of the poor transmission of language to the younger generation, we consider that studying both the Vlach speech and the Romanian language in the schools of Eastern Serbia may represent the necessary incentive for stopping and reversing the significant language shift which has taken place in the last century in the Vlach community.

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