1. “Not a real language?” Governing Romani language
education in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.
Hristo Kyuchukov, St. Elizabeth University, Bratislava, Slovakia
William New, Beloit College, Beloit, WI (USA)
Jill de Villiers, Smith College, Northampton, MA (USA)

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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)

7. Linguistic studies, cont.
• 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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?