“Not a real language?” Governing Romani language education in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

Hristo Kyuchukov, St. Elizabeth University, Bratislava, SlovakiaWilliam New, Beloit College, Beloit, WI (USA)

Jill de Villiers, Smith College, Northampton, MA (USA)

Cultural and linguistic background

• The Roma are an internally diverse, ethnically Indic group living in all European countries: the total population is between 8 and 12 million.

• The Romani language has a Sanskrit foundation (similar to Hindi) but has been altered and splintered through extensive contact with majority languages over the past millennium.

• Romani knowledge and use is robust in some regions, not spoken at all by Roma in other places, and rapidly diminishing in use in other places.

• Our study concerns Muslim Roma in Bulgaria who still speak Romani as a first language, and Roma in the Czech Republic, where Romani language competence is variable, but generally decreasing.

• All Roma across Europe also speak the dominant majority languages, though often they speak a significantly creolized variant of the national languages.

The centrality of pre-school education for the ‘Roma problem’

• The gateway for the long-term chances for Roma children in mainstream society occurs when they walk out of their home and into public school for the first time.

• Language ability and behavioral compliance to conventional, i.e. non-Roma, norms are deciding factors in this transition.

• General population tends not to regard Romani as a ‘real’ language in the same way that Bulgarian or Czech is real: perception of language is connected to perception of culture and value.

• Bilingualism is understood as a benefit as a product of schooling, but a liability when it precedes or accompanies schooling.

• Romani children face double-bind in schools: attempt to accept (false) promises of linguistic assimilation and cultural acceptance OR perform stigmatized cultural and linguistic identities.

The ‘right to language’ and language assimilation

• Framework Convention, and national constitutions, oblige states to ‘undertake to promote the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage.’

• CoE and EC suggest early Romani language education and training teachers of Romani enhances development of both L1, increasing chances to finish high school and enter university.

• But in schools in most places, e.g.. Bulgaria and Czech Republic, mastery of national language (of the majority) is the explicit prerequisite and goal of all public school instruction.

• Use of Romani language and expressions of romanipen are barely tolerated, but rarely promoted.

• Roma children who cannot meet this national language prerequisites are often placed in segregated special classes, where national language instruction is ineffective. In CZ, only 1.2% of Roma students complete HS; about 7% in BG.

The importance of recognizing intragroup difference

• In protecting Roma children against segregation, the ECtHR has them into a general class of ‘socially disadvantaged’ people in need of special consideration.

• This protection entails erasure of cultural, historical, and linguistic differences between groups, leading to ‘one size fits all’ policies and preconceptions about competence of Roma children.

• This study seeks to (a) show the competence and normal development of Roma children in Romani, and (b) to show the important differences in levels of Romani language competence and use between Roma communities with different histories and cultural practices.

• We also want to suggest that the (L1) Romani language competence of Roma children should be understood as an asset in the development of L2 Bulgarian/Czech language competence.

Linguistic studies

• The goal was to find item sets for linguistic concepts in Romani likely to be acquired between the ages of four and six, to allow the eventual determination of norms across Romani speakers, with attention to the dialect variations especially in morphology.

• Typically developing Roma children from Bulgarian and Czech villages, 20 from each, ages 4-6, were tested on 9 different subtests.

• The tests consisted of 9 subtests, for a total of 80 items• Comprehension tests (examples)

• Production tests (examples)

• The tests were administered by a native Romani speaker• Similar measures have been developed for other world languages,

providing some measure of comparability.

Linguistic studies, cont.

Results

• Czech Roma children were comparable to Bulgarian Roma children on some subtests, but significantly worse on other subtests. Worth noting the difficulty in finding Roma children who spoke sufficient Romani to participate in study.

• 7 of the 9 subtests proved to be highly correlated with age in months. The sentence repetition task was too difficult in this age, and grammatical aspect was quite variable despite mean growth.

• Some findings echo those in other languages, while others are unique to Romani.

• Generally, Bulgarian Roma children perform similarly to children learning other world languages, i.e., there is evidence of normal development of the mother tongue. Not true for Czech children

• Independent evidence that Bulgarian children perform better in Bulgarian better than Czech children performed in Czech.

Interpretation of Bulgarian results

• Bulgarian Roma comprise approximately 9-10% of the population, or 800,000 people. Roma – many of whom are Muslim, Turkish-speakers, have been present in Bulgaria since the 14th century.

• Bulgarian Roma children live primarily in small villages, and in Roma segregated settlements in big towns and cities

• Bulgarian Roma children still have an access to a rich Romani, including the preservation of local dialects, which is the language of preference of most adult speakers.

• During the communist regime in Bulgaria the segregation of Roma in the so called "Romani mahala" (Roma settlements) helped them to preserve the language and culture.

• ‘Attempts’ to integrate Bulgarian schools have been largely unsuccessful or un-sustained, limiting assimilation.

Interpretation of Czech results

• Roma in CZ number approximately 250,000, less than 2% of the population.

• Nearly all original Czech Roma perished in the Holocaust, and 75% of current Roma in CZ are the result of migration from Slovakia during the communist era.

• Czech Roma live mostly in and around cities in socially excluded localities: about half Roma children attend ‘special schools’ and the others attend regular Czech schools, though often they are in separate classes.

• CZ has pursued an active educational policy of linguistic and cultural assimilation with regard to all minority populations. Roma parents have been encouraged not to speak Romani at home.

• Czech Roma with limited formal education mostly speak an ‘ethnolect’ of standard Czech that includes Romani features.

Implications for policy and discourse

• Popular prejudice, active and passive discrimination, institutional racism, and a lack of physical and economic security is the common experience for Roma children in Bulgaria and CZ.

• There is minimal bilingual, or formal Romani education, in either country, and early school leaving is very common.

• Low levels of mastery of formal registers, written and spoken, of Bulgarian and Czech is the main limitation on opportunity for higher education, even high school.

• But the demographic, cultural, and linguistic contexts are very different.• Nonetheless, EU and NGO recommendations are very similar, if not identical:

more inclusion and preservation of culture, which might or might not include preservation of language.

• Today, in the 9th year of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, there has been limited progress toward this goal: there are many signs that exclusion has instead increased, with a deterioration of culture and language.

Implications for policy and discourse, cont.

• The results of the linguistic investigation suggest that Bulgarian Roma children have well-established knowledge and competence in Romani and Bulgarian. This seems partly due to a long history of spatial and social segregation, with populations of adequate size to preserve minority language use.

• The investigation suggests that Czech Roma children are in a precarious position with respect to language, without mastery of higher levels of either Romani or Czech.

• Policies of integration in both countries are both mandated, highly unpopular, and almost wholly ineffective.

Given these data about the children as issue, what kinds of action and thinking (i.e. policy) do you believe would be best for Roma children?