The Meglen Vlachs (Megleno-Romanians) of Serbia: a Community on the Verge of Extinction

Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, Mircea Măran

Abstract


The paper aims at presenting the Meglen Vlach community of Serbia, situated in a few villages near the border with Romania. Because of the very small number of members, this community has so far not been known to the scientific community or to the majority population of Serbia.The Meglen Vlachs arrived there in the 1950s from Huma (today in the FY Republic of Macedonia) and were “invisible” in official statistics as they were “concealed” among the Macedonian colonists, intended to repopulate, together with other Yugoslavs, the former German villages. However, many of them left shortly after, to return home, settle in other Macedonian localities or to migrate to Western European countries. Today, the Meglen Vlach dialect is actively spoken in Serbia by only a few people (terminal speakers, in linguistic terms), born in the inter-war period. The paper tries to determine whether their idiom is severely endangered (like the Meglen Vlach dialect in the other countries where it is spoken) or has already become an obsolete language. Finally, the article shows that the linguistic and cultural future of the Meglen Vlachs in Serbia inevitably leads to acculturation and assimilation.


Keywords


Meglen Vlachs, invisible minority, Yugoslavia, endangered language

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/rh.2016.41.197
Date of publication: 2016-09-29 09:33:18
Date of submission: 2016-09-26 14:45:09


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