30 July 2023

I am so happy to join the World Roma Federation's cultural preservation team as a linguist. I am sure that this will be a positive collaboration and historic development as we bring Romani language teaching and learning to a wider audience.

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Like many of you, understanding the full significance and weight of my family's ethnic origin was no quick and simple task for me due to the policies negatively impacting Roma and Sinti that were put in place in different countries, from those of cultural genocide, forced family separation and assimilation, such as by Maria Theresa and Joseph II in Central Europe, or Americanization in the United States, to the biological genocide by the Nazis. As a descendant of families which immigrated to America in 1897-1911 from the Banat region in historic eastern Hungary or modern day western Romania and of ancestors that came from the Austrian Czech and Hungarian Slovak lands to the Banat several decades before that, I was blown away when I found hundreds of individuals sharing the names of my ancestors and their close in-laws in the "Roma data from Auschwitz camp ledgers" and even among the non-Jewish minority of refugees on board the St. Louis who were denied asylum by the Cuban, U.S. and Canadian governments, forcing the ship to return to Europe in 1939.

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Our school's mission and vision centers the Romani language as a valued mother tongue and cultural heritage language (HL) for a very important reason. Much research supports the fact that "the mother tongue is the foundation of... connection with family, society, culture, and identity," (Zatreanu, 2023), as well as the fact "that HL speakers’ most common motivations for studying their HL are to reconnect with their cultural heritage and to create connections with other members of the community," (Gasca Jiménez and Adrada-Rafael, 2021). Due to the situation of historic exclusion of Romani language from domains of prestige and power, the situation of all Romani speakers mirrors that of other HL speakers, with linguistic subordination to the majority language in many ways constantly endangering the HL in local contexts, such as Spanish speakers in the U.S., and for Romani, in the global context as well due to the non-existence of a territory where Romani is the dominant language. 

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Language is something fundamental that helps us to get and stay connected to one another. When we don't use our HL in favor of the dominant language, we start to be alienated from each other and from parts of ourselves, our families, communities, societies, cultures, and identities. We can make a positive change now by working together and creating a community that contributes significantly to the empowerment of speakers and learners of this very special language and cultural heritage with roots in India.

References
Gasca Jiménez, L. & Adrada-Rafael, S. (2021). "Understanding Heritage Language Learners’ Critical
Language Awareness (CLA) in Mixed Language Programs." Languages 6: 37.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2007). "Roma data from Auschwitz camp ledgers." 

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (1996). "The St. Louis: Full passenger list and associated documents."

Zatreaunu, M. (2023). "The importance of Romani language learning and teaching for a more inclusive education for all." Inclusive Schools: Making a Difference for Roma Children.