Istro-Romanianin Oxford: 60 years of study

  • 8 novigrad 2022 lapidarium museum display case with audio and reel to reel tapes donated to the bodleian libraries

    The hISTROX project is about a European language which is in danger of being lost forever, and about the people who speak it. Linguists call it ‘Istro-Romanian’, because it is spoken in two areas of the Istrian peninsula in north-western Croatia. Its speakers call it ‘Žejanski’ (for the northern dialect) and ‘Vlaški’ (for the southern dialect).

  • hISTROX is the most recent, and most ambitious, research into Istro-Romanian in Oxford. Our interest in the language has its roots over 60 years ago, when the Oxford linguist Antony Hurren conducted fieldwork in the Istro-Romanian villages, gathering material on which he drew for his Oxford doctoral thesis A Linguistic Description of Istro-Rumanian and for a number of related studies on the grammar. In 2010, and again in 2017, Mrs Vera Hurren generously donated to the University of Oxford over thirty hours of sound recordings made by her late husband in the 1960s together with eight volumes of his field notebooks. The Hurren donation has been the basis, since 2018, for a new flowering of research into Istro-Romanian in Oxford. In particular, we have conducted our own fieldwork on Istro-Romanian, in 2019 and 2020, not only exploring how this language has changed since the 1960s, but also tracing how and why the population of speakers has dwindled over the past half-century. Crucially, we have been using online methods and social media to establish preliminary contacts with members of the speech community in émigré communities in the United States and Australia. We have conducted the following research projects:

  • ISTROX: the Istro-Romanian Language and the Oxford University Hurren Donation (Maiden, Brădeanu, Uță).

    Diasporic Istro-Romanians online (Brădeanu, Maiden)

    Istro-Romanians: linguistic heritage in online conversations (Brădeanu, Maiden, Uță)

  • In November 2020 the Oxford ISTROX project organized an international online workshop on the language, as part of The Twentieth International Conference of the Department of Linguistics: Romanian Language – Modernity and Continuity in Linguistics Research (Bucharest, 20-21 November 2020), and Uță and Maiden have edited a special double issue of Revue roumaine de linguistique (2022) on Istro-Romanian, mainly comprising studies presented at that workshop.

    9 novigrad 2022 the opening of the exhibition curated by istrox and the lapidarium museum

  • From June to August 2022, the ISTROX project and Hurren’s work was the subject of an exhibition (in English and Croatian) at the Lapidarium Museum in Novigrad, Croatia, entitled ISTROX 50 years of the Istro-Romanian Language: from the Oxford Hurren Collection to the ISTROX project. Many members of the Istro-Romanian-speaking community attended.

  • The ISTROX project was formally completed on the 31st of July 2021.  We have deposited the original Hurren materials in ORA (the Oxford Research Archive).

  • The Oxford tradition of research into Istro-Romanian is also now being carried forward by a doctoral student, Fabian Helmrich, who is working on a subject which also fascinated Hurren: the expression of aspect in the Istro-Romanian verb system. Helmrich is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

  • Maiden and Uță have been involved, in collaboration with scholars at Universitatea de Vest in Timișoara, Romania, and advised by Professor August Kovačec of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in editing and preparing for publication the fifth and final volume of Petru Neiescu’s dictionary of Istro-Romanian. This comprehensive and highly detailed dictionary was left unfinished when

    10 novigrad 2019 memebers of the istro romanian communities visit the istrox exhibition

    the author died in 2020. It will be published very soon.

    Oxford has a major research profile in the comparative and historical study of Romanian and the related varieties Istro-Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian. This work, mainly led by Martin Maiden, has yielded numerous results in the past ten years: over 40 publications on Romanian linguistics in refereed journals and volumes, as well as studies (published by Oxford University Press) designed to introduce general readers to Romanian, such as (e.g., Pană Dindelegan 2013; Maiden 2016). Latterly, various publications have begun to appear on Istro-Romanian published by the team (e.g., Uță and Maiden 2022; 2023; Maiden and Uță 2023, 2024; Brădeanu 2022). Oxford’s libraries have built an excellent collection of works on Daco-Romance linguistics and philology, including all the major Romanian dialect atlases.