Report on documenting the Gurbet Romani variety in East Serbia and creating the Romani-Serbian dictionary

Abstract

The paper reports on "Romani-Serbian Dictionary of the Knjaževac Gurbet Variety" (Ćirković & Mirić 2017), which originated from work on the project "Exploring the Language and Folklore of Roma in Knjaževac", financed by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia in two project cycles, 2016 and 2017. The project was spearheaded by the “Njegoš” National Library in Knjaževac. The linguistic team in cooperation with local Roma activists carried out field documentation of the language and folklore tradition of the Roma in Knjaževac and Minićevo. The primary goal was the documentation of Romani language and tradition, the secondary the development and practical implementation of the specific field work methodology. The language material collected was used to compile a Romani-Serbian dictionary with a brief collection of selected texts in Romani.