The Bayash in Croatia: Romanian vernaculars in Baranja and Medjimurje

Abstract

In the Balkans, apart from the Romanian communities historically inhabiting the countries which border on present-day Romania, the Romanian language is also spoken by other groups, one being the Bayash — small Roma-like communities speaking different vernaculars of the Romanian language and dispersed throughout Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria, with smaller numbers in Macedonia, Greece, Ukraine, Slovakia and Slovenia. They do not speak Romani and the vast majority are bilingual, actively using their native vernacular and the idiom of the local community in which they live. This paper offers an anthropological linguistic perspective on the Bayash from Croatia, namely on the communities from Baranja and Medjimurje, on the basis of the material audiorecorded in 2006 during two sessions of fieldwork researches. The linguistic material recorded in Baranja amounts to almost 20 hours. There we visited three Bayash settlements (Darda, Beli Manastir and Torjanci), whose inhabitants are divided into Munteni and Ardeleni, on a mainly, but not exclusively, linguistic basis, with the Munteni group being much better represented and their Muntean idiom having a great influence on the Ardelean one, spoken in Torjanci. The linguistic material from Medjimurje (recorded in the locality of Kuršanec) is more reduced than the one from Baranja, but the main linguistic comparison in the paper is between the Muntean vernacular from Baranja and the Ardelean one from Medjimurje.