Papers by Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovic
Revue roumaine de linguistique, 2025
The paper analyses the written use of a non-standardized, mostly oral variety of Romanian on soci... more The paper analyses the written use of a non-standardized, mostly oral variety of Romanian on social networks, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This variety is spoken by the Daj Nostri ("Our People") diaspora in the Germanspeaking countries Western Europe. Daj Nostri, who originate from Central and Eastern Serbia, form real and virtual networks and are actively using their language on the Facebook group and TikTok channel the analysis focuses on. The paper investigates the different spellings and code-switching the group members use, the topics that target the use of the variety, pointing to the emerging vernacular literacy, and also the language ideologies that emerge from the online comments. The author concludes that the enduring use of this non-standardized variety of Romanian, more than half a century after the first generations migrated from Serbia to Western Europe, is proof of the crucial role language plays in the ethnic identity of "Our People", while its current online use makes it appealing to younger generations of speakers.
Biological Conservation, 2024
Land-use changes resulted in a decline of biodiversity in recent European agricultural landscapes... more Land-use changes resulted in a decline of biodiversity in recent European agricultural landscapes. Nevertheless, regions practicing sustained low-input farming continue to harbor most of Europe's high-nature-value grasslands. The Serbian Carpathians represent one such relatively undiscovered region, boasting a well-preserved valuable bio-cultural heritage. Through novel interdisciplinary research that integrates botany, ecology, remote sensing, history, and ethnology, we explored two villages (Radenka, Suvi Do) with different ethnic backgrounds. Our primary objectives were to assess grassland plant diversity, correlate it with applied farming practices, and highlight the importance of interdisciplinary research in conservation of semi-natural grasslands. We focused on vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens that occur within randomly selected nested plot series, covering seven different spatial scales. The semi-natural grasslands in both villages exhibited remarkable plant diversity compared to other temperate meso-xeric and mesic grasslands in Europe. Integral parts of the historic farming system, such as the ancient practice of spring and autumn grazing of hay meadows, are still preserved there. Similarly, the timing of mowing and grazing based on traditional feasts continues to be observed. However, comparison of management intensity over the last 36 years indicates gradual abandonment in all studied parcels, due to severe depopulation, decline in livestock numbers, and a shift from milk to meat production. We advocate encouraging traditional grassland management practices to maintain high plant diversity. Our study underscores the need for interdisciplinary research, integrating social sciences to comprehend human influences on seminatural grasslands, and remote sensing to assess temporal variations in management practices and their intensity.
Open Linguistics, 2024
The present study analyzes the meanings bilingual and multilingual speakers attach to the term mo... more The present study analyzes the meanings bilingual and multilingual speakers attach to the term mother tongue, a familiar concept which is most often intuitively understood, but difficult to define. Taking as the main frame of reference the vulnerable linguistic communities of Serbia, the authors assess the answers given by the interviewees to the open question "What does the notion of mother tongue mean to you?" asked in the pilot sociolinguistic questionnaire the study is based on. The responses are classified in several categories, which are then analyzed and discussed. The findings show that the speakers give equal importance to the period of language acquisition, in early childhood, and the role of the family in language transmission for defining mother tongue. The diversity of responses obtained in the study suggests that the definitions provided by the censuses, used in the education context, human rights literature, or sociolinguistics, do not necessarily overlap with the social reality, as the actual members of the linguistic communities perceive the concept as being more heterogeneous than generally assumed and do not automatically connect it to mothers.
Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, 2024
This study focuses on a comparison of two sets of in-depth, face-to-face interviews among Romania... more This study focuses on a comparison of two sets of in-depth, face-to-face interviews among Romanians living in Poland about their perceptions of the country and society, and their migrant experiences. The interviews were conducted five years apart, using the same guide, but carried out by Polish interviewers in the first case, and by a Romanian interviewer in the second. Comparative analysis of the material gained in this process reveals that, despite similar content in interviewee responses, the standing of the interviewer was by no means neutral. Crucial for the volume, type, and nature of the collected data-as well as for its interpretation-is the interviewer's identity. In this regard, the study draws on Michael's Herzfeld's concept of 'cultural intimacy' to explain the mutual reproduction of different levels of identity and to develop a framework for analyzing the interaction between the social scientists and their interlocutors.
Journal of Ethnography and Folklore, 2024
Until the final decades of the 20th century, the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia practiced a rather unus... more Until the final decades of the 20th century, the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia practiced a rather unusual funerary custom about which very little was known: exhuming people who died very young 40 days after the funeral, so that the inconsolable family could see them once more. Apart from bringing peace and consolation to the family, it seems that the belief behind this custom was that if the corpse is taken out of the grave once more, so that the sun shines on it, the deceased would have two lives. The rare ethnographic references from the beginning of the previous century indicate a wider spread of the phenomenon in Eastern Serbia, among the Vlachs, but at the end of the 20th century, when the last exhumations were done, only a few villages in the Homolje region celebrated the custom. This paper draws on the few Serbian ethnographic sources from the first half of the last century and on the limited later mentions, and presents the narratives recorded by the authors in 2022 with Vlach interlocutors who had heard about the ritual, conducted it, or took part in it between 1970 and the 1990s. Special attention is paid to the area in which this phenomenon took place, situations in which the exhumation was done, and the beliefs underlying it.
Onomastica, 2023
This paper discusses the existence of two different systems of naming used among the Vlachs of Ea... more This paper discusses the existence of two different systems of naming used among the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia: a private one, based on their Vlach patronyms, used exclusively in their home villages and transmitted only orally, and an official, Serbian one. After presenting an overview of Romanian names and naming practices in the 18th–19th centuries, with a focus on the double naming system, the author explains how the Vlachs kept their Vlach patronyms after settling in Eastern Serbia, and how the second, official naming system, was Serbianized over time. In the second half of the paper, the author focuses on the recent phenomenon of the private, Vlach name gaining visibility and being used in writing, starting with the turn of the millennium, based on a variety of data sets. The increased visibility of the Vlach naming system reflects the recent increased prestige of the language, which was standardized and has started to be used in writing. The paper demonstrates that the double naming of the Vlachs reflects their dual, contextual identity, while the use in writing of the Vlach names signals an important shift in the attitude towards identity and language.
"Limba, literatura și cultura română: Provocări și perspective", 2023
The article represents the first thorough description of „Vorba noastră” („Our word”), published ... more The article represents the first thorough description of „Vorba noastră” („Our word”), published in Zaječar between 1945 and 1949, which was the first newspaper written in the Romanian variety spoken in Eastern Serbia and printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. The analysis of the 40 issues allowed us to observe the competition between the two ethnonyms, rumân and vlah, and the process of replacing the former term with the latter. At the same time, the micro-level language planning that takes place in the texts
published in „Vorba noastră” suggests that the newspaper can be seen as an example of incipient, circumstantial standardization of the variety of Romanian spoken in Eastern Serbia.
Teme, 2023
This paper discusses the increased visibility of Vlach Romanian in the linguistic landscape of ru... more This paper discusses the increased visibility of Vlach Romanian in the linguistic landscape of rural and small-town Eastern Serbia, analysing it in the context of the revitalisation measures the community has undertaken in the last 20 years. Our research was conducted in a mainly rural area, comprising four neighbouring municipalities in Eastern Serbia, with a dense Vlach population. We investigate a sample of the inscriptions we encountered, focusing on the intended audience of the inscriptions and correlating it with the basic functions of the signs (informational and symbolic). We show that, in the area under discussion, the signs have a mainly symbolic value, and are used as identity markers, as support for the legitimisation of the language, or as indexes of authenticity, while their informational function is apparent only in relation with the commodification of the language.
The Romance-Speaking Balkans
Eastern European Countryside, 2022
While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more rece... more While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more recent works have broadened the scope and conceptualisation of LL to include rural spaces. However, these works almost exclusively examine the Global North or the Global South. Suspended somewhere between the Global North and the Global South, the so-called Global East, to which Southeast Europe belongs, is for the most part excluded not just from notions of globality, but also from LL studies. The aim of this paper is to redirect the focus of LL research to a rural area in the Global East, namely, the village Ečka in the Serbian Banat, a region with a specific and lengthy history of multilingualism. We hold that the typologies used for the study of urban LL cannot yield relevant results if applied to rural LL. Our study is based on data collected in 2020 and 2021 during six field trips to Ečka which resulted in more than 300 photographs containing inscriptions in different languages and scripts. Furthermore, we conducted
Studii de Știință și Cultură, 2022
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the mobility of the Romanians in Vojvodina during the last o... more The aim of this paper is to evaluate the mobility of the Romanians in Vojvodina during the last one hundred years, and show that the dynamics of this population significantly changed its profile, making the use of both “historical Romanian community” and “Romanian diaspora” unfit to reflect the current state of this community. In the first part of the paper, we present the autochthonous Romanian community of Vojvodina until the First World War, to focus then on the influx of Romanian citizens registered after this date, who merged with the existing population. In the second part, we analyze the state policies of Yugoslavia, and later Serbia, towards their national minorities and foreign citizens in the country, and the effect they had on the Romanians within the borders of the country.
Anuarul Arhivei de Folclor, 2021
Starting from the observation that researchers have often uncritically opposed vernacular religio... more Starting from the observation that researchers have often uncritically opposed vernacular religiosity to official, teologic religion, either minimizing the importance of popular religious behaviour of the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia or totally dismissing the role played the church in the life of this community, the author advocates for a change of perspective. This change of perspective is meant to bring about a different reading of the situation in the region, in which the local people become the focus of research, not church, religion or customs as abstract concepts. The first part of the article briefly discusses the role of the church in Eastern Serbia during the last two centuries, the co‑existence of vernacular and official religion, as well as the recent reintroduction of the religious service in Vlach Romanian in several churches. The second part of the article presents archival documents and testimonies of people who have met Mother Măndălina, the patron of the Malajnica Monastery, the first Vlach monastery in Eastern Serbia. The transcribed testimonies are crucial in understanding the rural world of this region in the first half of the 20th century, where, contrary to the common belief, Vlachs and Serbs together frequented with a certain regularity the church. The testimonies are even more valuable for a future tracing of the beginning of the cult of Mother Măndălina, who belongs to both communities and environments, Vlach and Serbian, vernacular and theologic.
« Nous venons des Carpates, des Carpates indiennes, de Russie. » Gérer une identité traumatisée – le cas des Bayaches de Serbie
Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, 2021
By bringing to the readers’ attention an unpublished Ottoman era document in Romanian, issued in ... more By bringing to the readers’ attention an unpublished Ottoman era document in Romanian, issued in 1861 in Rabrovo, a village in the Vidin region, back then under Ottoman rule, the article tries to shed light on the wider historical and sociolinguistic context of the Romanian-speaking population south of the Danube in the 19th century. The document is a donation-adoption act by which a Romanian man gives one of his sons for adoption to his brother, who does not have heirs. The document is handwritten in Romanian, using Cyrillic script, signed by the chorbaji, mayor and eight witnesses, and stamped by the Turkish administrator. Though very short, it reveals several important facts about the Romanian-speaking population in Ottoman Bulgaria and its origin, the language used in communication and writing, family relations, etc. Coming from a family archive, this document of great emotional value for its owner, has also undisputable linguistic and historical significance.
“What Language Do We Speak?” The Bayash in the Balkans and Mother Tongue Education
The Romance-Speaking Balkans
This chapter surveys different Bayash communities in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and elsew... more This chapter surveys different Bayash communities in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and elsewhere, discussing how the initiatives to introduce their mother tongue in the educational system are preceded by a process of ideological clarification. The author examines language ideology in its specific correlation with language management and language standardization practices, shows how the Bayash communities view themselves culturally and historically and whether there is an opportunity for education in their native language in each state.
Balcanica
Elena Ceau?escu, spouse of the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceau?escu, generated in the 1980... more Elena Ceau?escu, spouse of the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceau?escu, generated in the 1980s a gigantic homage industry, as she was the object of a personality cult as strong as that of her husband?s. This paper briefly outlines the origin and elements of Nicolae Ceau?escu?s personality cult, to focus then on Elena Ceau?escu?s cult: how at first it was merged with the cult of her husband, her being a mere companion of the head of state, and then grew to the point of paralleling that of Nicolae Ceau?escu during the last years of communist rule in Romania. The second part focuses on the evolution of Romanian state television and its crucial role in the diffusion of her personality cult, showing how this state institution became completely subordinated to the presidential couple in the 1980s, and pointing to a paradox of the period: the shorter Romanian television?s daily broadcasting time, the larger the amount of programming on Ceau?escu. Finally, the paper shows how January wa...
Ivana Pantelić, Uspon i pad „prve drugarice“ Jugoslavije: Jovanka Broz i srpska javnost 1952-2013. [The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia’s “First Female Comrade”: Jovanka Broz and the Serbian Public, 1952-2013]. Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2018, 337 pp
Balcanica Posnaniensia. Acta et studia
Diacronia
În studiul de față ne ocupăm dintr-o perspectivă preponderent sociolingvistică de sistemele de sc... more În studiul de față ne ocupăm dintr-o perspectivă preponderent sociolingvistică de sistemele de scriere create de-a lungul timpului pentru reprezentarea grafică a variantei limbii române vorbite de comunitatea românofonă din Serbia de est. Urmărim în special ce influențează alegerea unui alfabet (latin sau chirilic), a unor convenții ortografice și a unui sistem de scriere și cum se corelează această alegere cu atitudinea ideologică (reintegraționistă sau independentistă) a propunătorilor. În acest scop, analizăm sistemele ortografice utilizate pentru redarea vernacularei în „Vorba noastră”, prima publicație în varianta locală (1945–1948), și mai ales sistemele propuse în ultimii 20 de ani de membrii comunității angajați în dispute politice și lingvistice (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, Societatea „Gergina”). Analiza și compararea sistemelor demonstrează importanța factorilor ideologici, sociali și politici în crearea și impunerea unei ortog...
Diacronia
In this article we examine, from a predominantly sociolinguistic perspective, the writing systems... more In this article we examine, from a predominantly sociolinguistic perspective, the writing systems created throughout time for the graphic rendering of the variety of Romanian spoken by the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia. We especially investigate what influences the choice of a script (Latin or Cyrillic), of orthographic conventions and of a writing system, and how this choice correlates with the ideological attitude (reintegrationist or independentist) of the proponents. To this end, we analyse the writing systems used for rendering the vernacular in “Vorba noastră”, the first publication in the local variety (1945–1948), and the systems put forward in the last 20 years by the members of the community engaged in political and linguistic debates (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, the “Gergina” Association). The analysis and the comparison of the systems attest to the importance of the ideological, social and political factors in creating and imposin...
Panoptikum
During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and... more During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literaturę presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment. The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early...
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Papers by Annemarie Sorescu-Marinkovic
published in „Vorba noastră” suggests that the newspaper can be seen as an example of incipient, circumstantial standardization of the variety of Romanian spoken in Eastern Serbia.
published in „Vorba noastră” suggests that the newspaper can be seen as an example of incipient, circumstantial standardization of the variety of Romanian spoken in Eastern Serbia.
This book is being released at a turning point in the history of the community: the revitalization measures and ongoing standardization process is dividing the ideologically divided Vlach society even more. In the coming years, it remains to be seen whether these changes will be able to challenge the stereotypes regarding the language and its speakers that still persist and whether these changes will bring about the greater use and visibility of Vlach Romanian.
Due to the multiple aspects covered, the book will be of interest to sociolinguists and ethnologists working on Romance varieties and minorities in Serbia and more generally in the Balkans, but also to the members of the Vlach community.
As the Banat was the closest to Yugoslavia, people “on this side of the border” were watching mesmerized the Yugoslav TV when the Romanian state television was offering only two hours of propaganda. The TV screen became a window into a more beautiful, free world. The television of the neighbouring country helped them pierce the iron curtain which was standing between the secluded Romania and the rest of Europe. Everyone who watched the Yugoslav TV (the “Serbs”, as they called it in Banat) fell in love with the “better world” on the other side of the border. Yugoslavia has long stood for the idyllic image of the promised land, the West in a nutshell. Everything “on the other side of the border” seemed better and more beautiful, be it on TV, or in real life: raspberries were bigger than in Romania, the radio and TV hosts had sexy voices, men were more determined, as my interlocutors declares, on the border of stereotyping and idealization.
After more than 25 years, this image is still alive. All my interlocutors have enthusiastically talked about this period and about the process of their growing up with Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav TV, while offering a sharp judgment of the Romanian society of the 1980s. They convinced their friends to take part in the study, even suggested to gather together, as they did twenty years ago, in front of the TV, when they could peep into the amazing world of personal freedom and consumerism. This book is dedicated to them, as well as to those “on the other side of the border”.
The book consists of three parts. The first part provides a brief historical review of the Romanian communist regime, with a special emphasis on the last years of Ceauşescu’s rule, when the country was marked by an acute crisis of the economy and society. In the 1980s the Romanian state television became one of the most absurd mass-media institutions in Europe, losing all its roles, except for propaganda. Next, I talk about the phenomenon of watching foreign TV programs in the border areas of Europe, in the second half of the last century, to focus on watching the Yugoslav TV in the western part of Romania. I also show how watching Yugoslav TV helped people learn Serbian and shaped their view on life. The second part of the book contains the complete transcription of 11 interviews, translated from Romanian into Serbian. The interviews were recorded in Timişoara between 2011 and 2014 (with two exceptions, which were sent by e-mail), with the original goal of studying the circumstances in which the subjects learned the Serbian language. Besides their importance for clarifying the context of learning Serbian, the narratives of my interlocutors contain fragments of oral history with illustrative depictions of everyday life on the western frontier of socialist Romania. The third part of the book is an annex with the language test the interlocutors solved and their answers, which show a high comprehensive and communicative competence, in spite of the two decades from the exposure to Serbian.
When my respondents talk about learning Serbian by watching Yugoslav TV during their childhood and adolescence, their critical attitude towards the Romanian communist regime is coupled with an admiration for socialist Yugoslavia and its system of values, which has lately been labelled Yugonostalgia. Yugonostalgia is most strongly manifested among the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia, many of whom have left the federation after its breakup, at the beginning of the nineties. Paradoxically, many Banat Romanians are also Yugonostalgic, more precisely, they are nostalgically and emotionally tied to liberal and lenient Yugoslav regime, idealized for the desirable aspects of life in former Yugoslavia, among which economic security, multiculturalism and a better standard of living. By making the interlocutors plunge into and examine their own past, the interviews had a therapeutic effect on them, helping them come to terms with the collective past, marked by a great historical shift.
In the first chapter, The Vlachs – an introduction, the author offers several landmarks for the origins and history of the Vlachs of north-eastern Serbia, trying to present them in the wider context of other Romanian language communities living in Serbia. After a detailed discussion on the Vlach vernaculars, the author focuses on the four Vlach dialectal and ethnographic groups – Ţărani, Ungureni, Ungureni-Munteni and Bufani, with a special emphasis on the last one. The second chapter, Studies on the folk culture of the Vlachs, represents a comprehensive review of the studies dealing with the folk culture of this community, which have been published both in Serbia and Romania, starting from the 19th century on. The third chapter, The present-day fieldwork with the Vlachs, apart from the theoretical frame on fieldwork methods, ethics and interaction, presents the characteristic features of this region, as far as field research is concerned, emphasizing, among others, the delicate issue of the researcher-interlocutor relation. As well, a special attention is paid to the stages which precede and follow fieldwork. In the fourth and last chapter of the first part, Is there a Vlach mythology?, the author shows that the mythological universe of this community is formed of a series of overlapping and intersections of variants, of blank spaces or shadowed ones, repetitions and redundancies, and the image which results from here is a blurry and protean one. In conclusion, one cannot generalize and talk about a Vlach mythology, but only about an assembly of mythological texts, obtained from different narrators. Here is where the author also details on the corpus she based her analysis on, which sums up more than a hundred texts, of different types and dimensions, collected personally between 2003 and 2009 in several localities from north-eastern Serbia.
The second part of the book, Draft for a mythological dictionary of the Vlachs, is comprised of eleven entries, which present eleven supernatural characters that appear in different mythological texts recorded with the Vlachs. All the entries have been compiled from a comparative perspective, Romanian and Slavic. For the very beginning, the author notices that the three demonic beings which people narrate about in all the regions of north-eastern Serbia inhabited by Vlachs (as well as in Romania, Serbia and wider in the Balkans) and which appear in the repertoire of almost every interlocutor are Ursitoarele (the Faiths), Zburătorul (the evil spirit tormenting girls and women) and Moroiul (the Ghost) – connected to three important periods in people’s life: birth, adulthood (its erotic side) and death. They can be classified as active demons, because they are narrated about in the present, out of personal experience, and the practices which aim to neutralize or to pacify them are still present nowadays. The other demonic characters presented in the book are: Ala, Sântoaderii, Joimărica, Miazanopţii, Muma pădurii, Samodiva, Şoimanele and Vâlva. Every time it was necessary, the author marked if they are still alive in the memory of her interlocutors, who tell about them using the present tense, and whether they are “active” or have been “deactivated”, being transformed into mere masks or processions.
The aim of the study was, on the one hand, to place the community of Vlachs from north-eastern Serbia in a wider historical and ethnological frame, which would offer an accurate and scientifically objective image of this community, which is today object of intense political debates, and on the other hand, to mark the relations, influences and confluences in the domain of folk beliefs about supernatural beings from this border space, situated at the intersection of more cultures.