VLASHKI/ZHEYANSKI (ISTRO-ROMANIAN) IN THE 21ST CENTURY: LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION

This article describes and discusses my work on the documentation and revitalization of Vlashki/Zheyanski (Istro-Romanian), a severely endangered language spoken in Croatia and various places outside of it. This documentation work took place over a period of several years in the late 2000's and 2010's and has resulted in the production of an annotated language corpus containing audio and video recordings of the speech of over forty different fluent and active speakers from Croatia and a sociolinguistic study of language shift in the community, among others. The documentation, carried out in the scope of two major projects, was conducted following a method of community-oriented collaborative language documentation, and was combined with numerous activities geared toward language revitalization which are also enumerated and described in the paper. The paper ends with some thoughts regarding the problems encountered in the course of this work and suggestions for work with very small endangered language communities.