Romanian language in Serbia

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Map of the municipalities of Serbia where either Romanian or "Vlach" was declared as native language in the 2002 Serbian census.
  1–5%
  5–10%
  10–15%
  15–25%
  25–35%
  over 35%

The

Cyrillic alphabet
. This has been criticized in Romania, and attempts to bring Romanian-language resources and education to the Timok Vlachs have been blocked by the Serbian authorities.

In January 2020, the Romanian Academy and the Academy of Sciences of Moldova issued a joint "Declaration on Unity of Romanian Language" condemning any attempts which has the aim politicisation of the Romanian language.[3] In February 2020, the Romanian Academy made an appeal to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts to contribute to the "normalisation of the exposed situation" regarding attempts to politicize the Romanian language in Serbia.[4]

Vojvodina

Ethnic composition of Vojvodina showing areas with a Romanian ethnic majority in red

Legal status

Article 10 of the

Cyrillic
script shall be officially used. In addition it notes that in the regions inhabited by national minorities, their own languages and scripts shall be officially used, as established by law.

Article 6 of the Statute of the Autonomous Province of

Rusyn languages and their scripts, as well as languages and scripts of other nationalities, shall simultaneously be officially used in the work of the bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, as established by the law. The bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina are: the Assembly, the Executive Council and the Provincial administrative bodies.[5]

The National Council of the Romanian National Minority has a department that attends to the analysis and promotion of the official use of the Romanian language.

Among others, decisions and laws established by the Assembly of the Autonomous Province of

judicial interprets to the district courts in Novi Sad and Pančevo.[8]

At the local level, the Romanian language and script are officially used in

Straža (Romanian: Straja), Mali Žam (Romanian: Jamu Mic), Malo Središte (Romanian: Srediștea Mică), Mesić (Romanian: Mesici), Jablanka (Romanian: Jablanka), Sočica (Romanian: Sălcița), Ritiševo (Romanian: Râtișor), Orešac (Romanian: Oreșaț) and Kuštilj (Romanian: Coștei).[9]

The non-governmental organisation "Municipal parliament the "free" city of Vršac" (Romanian: Parlamentul orășenesc orașul "liber" Vârșeț) started a project to encourage the public use of Romanian as an official language. The campaign is included in the program "Minority Rights in Practice in South Eastern Europe", initiated together by the King Baudouin Foundation, Open Society Found Belgrade, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Citizen's Initiatives.

In the 2002 census, Serbia's most recent, 1.45% citizens of Vojvodina declared Romanian as their mother tongue (0.1% of the world's Romanophones).

Religious education and service

A church in Vojvodina where religious service is performed in the Romanian language (Alibunar).

Vojvodina hosts 40 Romanian historical parishes, with 42 priests.[10] It is under the jurisdiction of the Romanian Orthodox Eparchy "Dacia Felix" based in Vršac and headed by Daniil Partoșanul, vicar bishop of the Archdiocese of Timișoara.

Starting in 2006, religion in the Romanian language is taught in state schools. Textbooks for the first and the second grade were published after they were approved by the Commission of the Government of the Republic of Serbia for Religious Education in Elementary and Middle Schools.[11]

Arts

On 15 November 2003, the professional Romanian theatre was refounded, after almost 50 years, to perform in Romanian. The theatre is based in Vršac, on the scene of the "Sterija" National Theatre.

Romanian literature is represented in Banat starting with Victor Vlad Delamarina and including more recent writers. The contribution of Vojvodina-based writers is significant within the works published in the entire Banat, through authors such as Vasile Barbu, president of the "Tibiscus" Literary-Artistic Society in Uzdin, Pavel Gătăiantu, Ana Niculina Ursulescu, Virginia Popovici, Slavco Almăjan and Marina Puia Bădescu. The state finances a publishing house, Libertatea. Casa de Presă și Editură Libertatea publishes 20 titles each year. For the 45th edition of the Belgrade Book Fair, the house prepared a CD with the nine most successful titles, under the slogan "3,000 pages for the third millennium" (Romanian: 3.000 de pagini pentru mileniul trei). Other publishers are based in Vojvodina, including Editura Fundației.

Education

Vojvodina hosts 37 education facilities that use Romanian as their teaching language, including two high schools.

Lokve
(Romanian: Sân-Mihai).

Media

Internet presence of the Romanian weekly Libertatea

Vojvodina provides public information in the Romanian language, as per the Statute of the APV, article 15. The government partially finances daily and weekly newspapers in the languages of the national minorities, among them the Romanian weekly

Antena 3, Realitatea TV
, TVS Oradea, TVS Craiova, Etno TV, Favorit TV, Taraf TV in a special Romanian package.

Victoria, a 24-hour Romanian-language radio station, was launched in 2006. It broadcasts on 96.1 FM informative, musical and cultural formats. The radio station can also be streamed.[19]

Timok Valley

Map of the Romanian-speaking Vlachs of the Timok Valley

Status

The Romanian language has far less support in the Timok Valley. Although whether the speech of the Vlachs is really Romanian and the endonym limba vlaha ("Vlach language")[20] exists, all linguists consider them to speak Romanian.[21][22][23]

Serbian statistics list Vlach and Romanian languages separately depending on what people declared in the census. This does not mean that the Serbian government has an official position on the matter. ISO has not assigned it a separate language code following the ISO 639 standard. In the 2002 census, 40,054 people in Serbia declared themselves ethnic Vlachs and 54,818 people declared themselves native speakers of the Vlach language.

The Romanian language of Timok does not have official status and it is not standardized. Thus, some members of the Timok Vlach community ask for standard Romanian to be made official in the areas inhabited by Vlachs until the standardization of a proposed"Vlach language".[24]

According to some media sources, Serbia recognized "Romanian" as the native language of the Vlach community, through the act of confirmation of the National Council of the Vlach (Roumanian) National Minority in August 2007; the organization had listed Romanian as the native language of the community in their statute.[verification needed][25][26][27]

Characteristics

Its two main variants, "Ungurean" and "Țăran", are subordinated forms of the Romanian varieties spoken in Banat and Oltenia, respectively.

The speakers have been isolated from Romania and their speech did not include the

neologisms (for some abstract notions, as well as technological, political and scientific concepts) borrowed by Romanian speakers across the Danube from French and Italian
and as such, they use Serbian counterparts, as Serbian has been the language of education for nearly two centuries.

Media

Radio Zaječar[28] and Radio Pomoravlje[29] broadcast programmes in the Romanian variant of the Timok Vlachs.

Linguistic atlas of the Romanian Academy

As a result of more than 20 years of field research, the Romanian Academy published a two-volume atlas of sub-dialects of the Romanian language between Morava, Danube and Timok.[30] The research included almost all settlements inhabited by speakers of the Romanian language in Central Serbia and represents one of the most detailed research of this kind of any area where Romanian speakers live. It was a part of the wider research on dialectology in Europe, and its results will be included in the updated version of the Atlas Linguarum Europae.[31]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Violation of the human rights of the Romanian ethnic minority in Serbia". assembly.coe.int. Retrieved 16 April 2023.
  2. ^ Herman, Jürgen (14 February 2008). "Report 11528 on the situation of national minorities in Vojvodina and of the Romanian ethnic minority in Serbia". Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. Retrieved 15 April 2023.
  3. ^ Romanian Academy (30 January 2020). "Declaration on Unity of Romanian Language" (PDF). Academia Română. Retrieved 15 April 2023.
  4. ^ Romanian Academy (20 February 2020). "Letter to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts" (PDF). Academia Română.
  5. ^ "Official use of languages and scripts in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina". Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities. Retrieved 18 October 2010.
  6. ^ "Department of Translations" (in Romanian). Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities. Retrieved 18 October 2010.[failed verification]
  7. ^ "About us" (in Romanian). Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities. Retrieved 18 October 2010.
  8. ^ "Judicial interprets" (in Romanian). Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities. Retrieved 18 October 2010.[permanent dead link]
  9. ^ "Official use of the Romanian language in the APV" (XLS). Provincial Secretariat for Regulations, Administration and National Minorities.
  10. ^ Romanian Global News: "PS Daniil Stoenescu va înființa un centru religios la Vârșeț“ Archived 28 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine (in Romanian), published on 17 August 2005
  11. ^ Marinica Ciobanu: "Moise Ianeș, Părintele Vicar al Vicariatului Ortodox Român: Între ciocan și nicovală” Archived 6 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine (in Romanian) published in Libertatea on 11 March 2007
  12. ^ "Copiii românilor din Serbia-Muntenegru vor învăța la școli din Romania“ Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine (in Romanian), published in the informative bulletin Divers
  13. ^ Marcel Baica: "La studii spre România: Un mare interes pentru înscrierea la facultății“ Archived 6 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine (in Romanian), published in the weekly Libertatea, on 20 August 2005
  14. ^ Procesul verbal al ședințelor din 3, 4 și 5 decembrie 2002 ale Comisiei pentru Învâțământ, Știință, Tineret și Sport din Cadrul Camerei Deputaților a României (in Romanian)
  15. ^ Radio Novi Sad – Romanian language section[permanent dead link] (in Romanian)
  16. ^ "Filmovi - TV program Srbije". www.krstarica.com.
  17. ^ "BBCRomanian.com | Institutional | Frecvențe pe care ne puteți recepționa". www.bbc.co.uk.
  18. ^ Digi TV Serbia – About Archived 20 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine (in Serbian)
  19. ^ Fluxul audio "Radio Victoria” Archived 10 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  20. ^ Website of the Federația Vlahilor(Rumânilor) din Sârbie Archived 26 October 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  21. ^ Gustav Weigand, Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebiets, 1909, Leipzig: Barth
  22. ^ Petru Neiescu, Eugen Beltechi, Nicolae Mocanu, Atlas lingvistic al regiunii Valea Timocului – Contribuții la atlasul lingvistic al graiurilor românești dintre Morava, Dunăre și Timoc, Cluj-Napoca, 2006
  23. ^ Slavoljub Gacović, Od Rimljana i latinskog do Rumuna Timočana i vlaškog, Nacionalni savet vlaške nacionalne manjine, Bor, 2008
  24. ^ Danas "Svedeni smo na vlaško kolo" Archived 25 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, 19 March 2007
  25. ^ "Vlachs of Serbia recognised as a national minority" ("Vlahii din Serbia recunoscuți ca minoritate națională"), published by BBC on 17 August 2007: "Vlachs were finally recognised as a national minority and the Romanian language was accepted as their native language"
  26. ProTV
    on 19 August 2007
  27. ^ "Serbia recognised that the Vlachs of Timoc speak Romanian" Archived 29 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine ("Serbia a recunoscut că «vlahii» din Timoc vorbesc românește"), published in Gardianul, 3 August 2007
  28. ^ "Danas.rs greška". 25 July 2011. Archived from the original on 25 July 2011. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  29. ^ "Radio Valea Moravei - Vlaski Radio Pomoravlje - 100% Vlaski radio". Archived from the original on 14 September 2007.
  30. ^ "Inst-Puscariu". inst-puscariu.ro. Retrieved 16 April 2023.
  31. ^ Bejinaru, Silviou-Ioan. "GEOLINGVISTICA ROMÂNEASCĂ ÎN ERA DIGITALĂ" (PDF). Academia Română. Retrieved 15 April 2023.
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