Promotion and Preservation of Gurbet Romani in Eastern Serbia: Actions Targeting Children and Youth

The paper deals with the Gurbet Romani variety spoken in Eastern Serbia, an area with an extensive language contact between Serbian as the dominant language and Romani as a minority language. The paper focuses on the Romani language classes in one of the schools in the town of Knjaževac (Eastern Serbia), as well as on the workshops and publishing activities organised by the local library with the purpose of promoting and preserving Romani varieties through the activities targeted at primary-school pupils, but also through publishing the work young local Roma authors. The aim of the paper is to investigate the ongoing participatory measures taken by the local community in Knjaževac, focusing on those targeting children and youth. I recorded a workshop and several semi-structured interviews with the school’s principal, first-to-fourth grade teachers, pedagogical assistant, Romani language teacher, librarian and pupils. The qualitative analysis suggests that the activities organised by the library in Knjaževac represent significant affirmative measures for the promotion of Romani, which are crucial in the context of marginalization and restricted domains of language usage as indicated by my informants