New prize raises the profile of an endangered European language

A speaker of Vlaški – a little-known and severely endangered Romance language – has created a prize to help preserve his mother tongue after his involvement in a language project run by the University of Oxford.

Libero Soldatić, 85, and his wife Daisy Soldatić have made a generous gift to establish The Anton Soldatić and Antonija Soldatić (née Skalir) Memorial Prize in memory of his parents.

The prize will be awarded annually to an Oxford student for research about the languages spoken in Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula, with a preference for work focused on the severely endangered Vlaški language.

Mr Soldatić grew up in the Istrian Peninsula region of Croatia, born under Italian occupation and then in what became part of Yugoslavia, before emigrating to Italy with his mother as a young child. He learnt English when he arrived in Australia at 17 years, and his use of Vlaški diminished.

However, he became reacquainted with his mother tongue in 2020 thanks to Professor Martin Maiden’s ISTROX research project about Vlaški. The project, called ISTROX, is a community sourcing project at the University of Oxford involving worldwide speakers of this severely endangered language. Mr Soldatić’s daughter, Karen, found the ISTROX project online during the Covid-19 pandemic, and introduced her father to Professor Maiden at Oxford. This led to weekly conversations in Vlaški between Mr Libero and Dr Oana Uță Bărbulescu a researcher on the ISTROX project and Oxford’s Lector in Romanian.

This personal and important donation has not only provided valuable insight into Vlaski but allowed the Soldatić family to re-discover their heritage, and it has seen Mr Soldatić reconnect with his childhood.

“This endowment fund is an opportunity to recognise and honour the life journeys of my mother and father and our cultural history as Vlaški minorities which has been ignored until now. The ISTROX project documents the important history of Šušnjevica and our surrounding villages."
Libero Soldatić

The ISTROX project came to fruition as a result of the intellectual legacy of Oxford linguist, Tony Hurren (1933-2006). Hurren studied this already highly endangered language in the late 1960’s, which linguists call ‘Istro-Romanian’, spoken then by only a few hundred people in the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia, in the late 1960’s. The result was an Oxford DPhil. thesis on the language, now available here.

In 2010, Tony Hurren’s widow, Mrs Vera Hurren, generously donated over 30 hours of sound recordings made by her husband in the 1960s together with his field notebooks and other material including photographs, to the University of Oxford. The Hurren donation has been the basis, since 2018, for burgeoning research into Istro-Romanian in Oxford, funded hitherto by Oxford’s John Fell Fund, PER Seed fund project, and TORCH Knowledge Exchange Innovation Fund.

In particular, the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics have conducted their own fieldwork on Istro-Romanian, not only exploring how this language—now recognized by UNESCO as severely endangered—has changed since the 1960s, but also tracing how the population of speakers has dwindled over the past half-century and, crucially, using online methods and social media to establish contacts with members of the speech community in émigré communities in the US and Australia.

Photograph: Daisy and Libero Soldatić