ISTROX

What is ISTROX?
ISTROX is a two-year project (2018-2020) of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Part of the project has been developed with the help of Zooniverse.
ISTROX is a pilot project. We aim to build on it in the future, adding new data and forming a complete picture of the Istro-Romanian language as it is today and was in the past.

What is ISTROX about?
ISTROX aims to conserve and explore part of the history of Istro-Romanian language, better known to its speakers as Vlaški or Žejanski, and recognized by UNESCO as a "severely endangered language". Today it has at most a few hundred speakers in the Istria (Croatia) and in several émigré communities worldwide.
ISTROX is based on a collection of sound recordings made in Istria during the 1960s by the linguist Tony Hurren, and donated to the University of Oxford’s Taylor Institution Library by his wife, Mrs Vera Hurren.
To learn more about ISTROX, click above on ABOUT or go to our website.

Why is this community-sourced through Zooniverse?
Because we believe that the speakers are always the most precious and authoritative asset for the study of a language, especially one in danger of disappearing! During the first phase of our project, we indexed the contents of the sound recordings, segmented the recordings into coherent 'snippets' to be further used for linguistic analysis. The recordings include many narrations, folk tales, and reminiscences. There are passages in them which we are not confident that we understand, and here you can really help us if you know the language.

The photos
The photos attached to the sound recordings were taken by Tony Hurren in the villages where he conducted his linguistic research. They don’t necessarily have any direct connection with the audio clips to which they have been paired, but they do show some of the people Tony Hurren interviewed. We have obtained the appropriate consent to put these photos online.
We’d be happy to read any comments you may have about the photos, such as memories about the places or the people represented in them or stories to do with your or your relatives’ lives in these villages. To comment on the photos, please go to TALK.

I want to contribute. How should I start?
Before you start translating, you first need to register. Just click on REGISTER.
Then please fill in our short QUESTIONNAIRE – you will find a link to it on the home page of the project. (To go to the home page, just click on the name of the project: ISTROX).
After this, you can start translating: just scroll down from the project home page until you see the names of the two language varieties: Žejanski or Vlaški. Please start with whichever variety you speak or understand better, but when you’ve done that we’d like you also to help us with the other variety.
As you start, you will be offered the option of watching a very short TUTORIAL which should clarify any other questions that you may have. Please go through the tutorial and you will be ready to go. Enjoy!

What happens with the data that we are gathering here?
We will use your responses to complete the gaps in our translation and, further on, to analyse the resulting material and compare it with what we already know about the Istro-Romanian language from other sources.
Our main goal is to preserve a record of Istro-Romanian, both for the community of speakers and their descendants, and for linguistic scholarship. Upon completion, we will make the original material and resulting research data available online for the benefit of everyone interested, and of course for the Istro-Romanian communities themselves. We also intend that the material resulting from our research will provide the foundation for a planned History of the Istro-Romanian Language.
All the contributors to our online project will be credited in our print and online publications. If you decide to contribute, we will contact you with a question about how you prefer to be credited.

I am already a contributor, how can I help out more?
We also want to find out how many speakers of Vlaški and Žejanski are living outside Croatia, and to establish channels of communication with them for our future research.
Therefore, please let other speakers know about our interest in your language and do contact us if you have any ideas about how we could get in touch with them. Thank you!

How can I ask a question that is not in the FAQ?
Please go to the TALK section of this project and start a discussion in the relevant sub-section. Alternatively, feel free to write to us at istrox@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk.