ISTROX

ISTROX is a two-year project (2018-2020) of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. Based on a body of sound recordings donated to the Taylor Institution Library (part of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries), this interdisciplinary project combines linguistic research and community-sourcing to explore a significant portion of the history of a severely endangered language: Istro-Romanian.

So-called ‘Istro-Romanian’ (Vlaški or Žejanski to its speakers) is a Romance language: like its sisters languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, French, or Italian) it is a descendant of the Latin of the Roman Empire. As the term ‘Istro-Romanian’ suggests, the language is most closely related to the major Romance language of Eastern Europe, namely Romanian. In fact it is one of four major branches of what linguists call ‘Daco-Romance’, the surviving Romance (Latin-based) languages of south-eastern Europe, continuing the Latin assumed to have been spoken in the Roman province of Dacia. The three sisters of Istro-Romanian within the Daco-Romance family are: Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian.
The term ‘Istro-Romanian’ was invented by linguists because it is a form of Romanian language spoken in Istria. There is no real indigenous word for the language in all its varieties. While the Croatian word ‘istrorumunjski’ may now be used by native speakers as a cover-term for the language, they usually refer to the ‘northern’ variety, spoken in Žejane, as Žejanski and to the 'southern' variety, spoken in and around Šušnjevica, as Vlaški. (For more information about the language, and for an essential bibliography, see our website).

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In 2010, the Taylor Institution Library received the Hurren Bequest - a collection of tape-recordings of Istro-Romanian made in Istria, during the 1960s, by the linguist Tony Hurren. Hurren gathered recordings from 36 informants, covering nearly all the villages in which Istro-Romanian was spoken. He also worked with a large representative sample of speakers, of all ages. The recordings are not just of crucial interest to linguists, but also contain unique documentation of the history of the community that spoke, and still speaks, the language. They include folktales, accounts of local traditions, and autobiographical remarks and stories.

The material donated to the Taylor Institution Library has never been published, and its existence is still virtually unknown to the wider world. Although Tony Hurren drew on it for his doctoral thesis, for his outline grammar of the language, and for some published research articles, the recordings remain an almost wholly untapped, and exceptional, repository of information about the language.

However, the materials present an unusual problem. Linguists are used to facing written records of earlier stages in the history of a language, and then applying their philological skills to discern the spoken reality which those written texts reflect. The present case is the other way around: our historical material is almost exclusively aural, and an essential preliminary task is to fix it in written form. Without this it will be substantially inaccessible to potential users. The Hurren donation includes field notebooks with written material corresponding to the recordings, but these are not a complete written description of them.

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At the heart of our project is the linguistic analysis of the sound-recorded material. How far does it confirm what we already know about Istro-Romanian from other sources? Does it offer new insights into the structure and use of the language? How different is it from what other researchers found? How different does it seem to modern speakers of the language? Hurren’s notebooks are a very useful guide to the contents of the tapes, presenting in written form the linguistic questionnaires used, and transcribing some of the recordings. But by no means all of the sound-recorded material is reflected in the notebooks, and there are many gaps and interesting discrepancies that require interpretation with the help of modern speakers.

During the first phase of our project, which started in September 2018, we produced a detailed description and index of the contents of the sound recordings, segmented the recordings into coherent 'snippets' to be further used for linguistic analysis, and subsequently selected the ambiguous or obscure passages in the recordings that we would like to open up to the remaining speakers of the language. We also indexed the contents of Hurren's field notebooks, and matched the written materials with the sound recordings. Two members of our team conducted fieldwork in Croatia, where they traced Hurren’s original subjects, or their surviving relatives, and obtained their consent to use the photographs and recordings for our research, and to make them publicly accessible online.

The second phase of the project, to start in April 2020, is dedicated to community-sourcing. As the native speakers are always the most precious and authoritative asset for the study of a language, especially one in danger of disappearing, we are very keen to involve the remaining speakers of Vlaški and of Žejanski, to help us understand the most problematic segments of the audio material left by Tony Hurren.

On this Zooniverse platform, we have uploaded a range of selected audio samples which we find problematic in terms of linguistic meaning or structure. We are now encouraging the remaining speakers of the Istro-Romanian language, whether in Croatia or elsewhere in the world, to help us interpret these audio samples by listening to, and commenting on them.

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ generally implies large numbers of contributors, while the number of Istro-Romanian speakers is small. Therefore, we are using a different terminology – community sourcing - to acknowledge the fact that, in this case, the ‘crowd’ is smaller and not necessarily anonymous. While conventional crowdsourcing projects aim to attract as wide a ‘crowd’ as possible and, from that, carve out a smaller ‘community’ of invested participants, we start from an existing, albeit limited, number of speakers of Istro-Romanian who are deeply invested in the preservation of their linguistic and cultural identity, and whom we invite as peer contributors to our project.

We are keen to stress that we plan to do this part of our research in collaboration with the Istro-Romanian community rather than simply producing a body of scholarhip about this community, or about their language. ISTROX will allow these speakers to become co-creators of a new body of linguistic knowledge which will later be incorporated into the wider process of transcription and explanation of the Hurren material, and drawn on in our subsequent linguistic analysis.

We have already met some members of the communities of speakers of Žejanski and Vlaški in Žejane and Šušnjevica, who showed interest in our project. Yet in a world which relies increasingly on online interactions, we hope that the community-sourcing element of our research will attract not only the Istro-Romanian communities of Croatia but also those from the diaspora, thus sparking renewed international interest in the language and its speakers.
Our main goal is to preserve a record of this disappearing language, both for the community of speakers and their descendants, and for linguistic scholarship.

Upon completion, ISTROX will make the original material and resulting research data available online for the benefit of the scholarly and the Istro-Romanian communities.
ALL THE CONTRIBUTORS TO OUR ONLINE PROJECT WILL BE CREDITED IN OUR PUBLICATIONS.

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ISTROX is a pilot-project funded by the John Fell Fund.
We plan to develop it further in the following years. Apart from helping us clarify some difficult aspects of Hurren’s recordings, ISTROX is meant to allow us to assess the number of speakers of Vlaški and Žejanski living outside Croatia, and to establish a channel of communication with them.
Therefore, if you speak or understand Vlaški and Žejanski, please get involved and also let other speakers know about our interest in your language.
The material resulting from our research will provide the foundation for a planned History of the Istro-Romanian Language, which will cover the origins and the history of the language and will include references to the migrant experiences of its speakers.

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AUDIO AND VISUAL MATERIAL: COPYRIGHT NOTICE AND TAKE-DOWN POLICY

All the archive visual and aural material that we have included on this site was produced by Tony Hurren during his fieldwork visits to Istria. We have the written permission of Mrs. Huurren to use this material as part of our research, both online and in print.
The contemporary photographs that we (will) include here have been taken either by members of our team or by a professional photographer (Bojan Mrđenović) who accompanied us during our first fieldwork research in Croatia.
As the project develops, we may decide to include other photographs taken by some of the speakers of Vlaški or Žejanski whom we have encountered during our research, and who offered these photographs to us with their permission to make them public.
In all cases, we have acted in good faith when making this material available online. We have obtained the consent of those who appear in the archive photographs - with only a few exceptions, where we were assured by the former participants in Hurren’s research that those who appear in the photographs have either passed away, with no known relatives, or have moved outside Croatia, with no known means of contacting them or their descendants.

If you find anything on this site which you feel that should not be here, please email us at istrox@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk and let us know if you believe that some of the material included here needs to be ethically cleared with you. We will be happy to do that, and to remove the respective material within 48 hours from receipt of your message.
Please include the following information: your full name, your contact details, details of the material that you believe includes you or a relative of yours, and where exactly on the site you came across this material. Thank you for your understanding.

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THANK YOU

We are deeply grateful to Mrs Vera Hurren for her donation of the Hurren Bequest and for her sustained kindness in answering our many questions about her husband and his work.

We are also grateful to Dr Robert Doričić and Mrs Viviana Brkarić for their generous assistance in putting us in touch with members of the Istro-Romanian community, and to photographer Bojan Mrđenović, who documented our encounters with the members of the community during spring 2019. We are grateful to DR. Zvjezdana Vrzić for her interest and advice. Thanks also to Professors August Kovačec, Petru Neiescu, Richard Sârbu, and Goran Filipi for their interest and support.

Above all we thank the members of the communities in Žejane and Šušnjevica for receiving us so kindly and for giving so freely of their time to help us, and to all speakers of the Istro-Romanian language who are willing to put time into helping us complete this stage of our project.