Dictionary of the Istro-Romanian Dialect (Dicționarul dialectului istroromân)

Two members of our team – Martin Maiden and Oana Uță Bărbulescu – were in Zagreb on the 25th of September for a presentation of the fifth and last volume of the Dictionary of the Istro-Romanian Dialect (Dicționarul dialectului istroromân, Romanian Academy Publishing House, 2024), which represents a lifetime’s work by the eminent Romanian linguist and dialectologist Professor Petru Neiescu.

The event took place thanks to the kind auspices of the The Romanian Embassy in Zagreb and of Mrs Mihaela Cămărășan, Romanian ambassador to Croatia. It was attended by Croatian guests, including Professor August Kovačec of the Croatian Academy of Science, also a world authority on Istro-Romanian and on Romanian, by Staša Skenžić, head of service and Viktor Koska, advisor within the Directorate for National Minorities of the Croatian Ministry of Education and Mass Media, by representatives of Croatian publishing houses, by Associate Professor Dr Petar Radosavljević, head of the Department of Romanian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - University of Zagreb, by Associate Professor Dr Ivana Olujić, editor-in-chief of the

Meeting in the The Romanian Embassy in Zagreb

Romanian-Croatian bilingual magazine "VERSO", by Dr Silvia Giurgiu, lecturer at the same department and for the Institute of the Romanian Language, by students at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Romanian Language and Literature - University of Zagreb, as well as by members of the Association of Romanians in Croatia.

In recent years, Dr Uță Bărbulescu and Prof. Maiden, working with Prof. Ana-Maria Pop and Prof. Gabriel Bărdășan of the Universitatea de Vest, Timișoara, and with the constant support and expert advice of Professor August Kovačec, have been working to publish the final volume of the dictionary, which had sadly remained unfinished at the time of Professor Neiescu’s death in 2020. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Neiescu’s daughter, Mrs Lucia Neiescu, for giving us access to all her father’s materials and thereby enabling us to bring to completion his extraordinary achievement. 

The dictionary is an invaluable tool for linguistic researchers. It also stands as a monument to Professor Neiescu’s scholarship and to the life, language, and culuture of the now small but still lively community of Istro-Romanian speakers without whom—as Professor Neiescu would have been the first to acknowledge— the dictionary would have been impossible.