News
Romani Studies Panel
On March 17, 2026, a panel titled “What’s in a Verb? Corpus and Experimental Research on the Romani Language in Serbia” was organized by the Board for the Study of Life and Customs of Roma of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Panel participants were Svetlana Ćirković, principal research fellow, and Mirjana Mirić, senior research associate at the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, as well as Marko Simonović from the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz. They presented the results of the project “What’s in a Verb? Mapping Serbian Verbs Borrowed into Romani”, funded by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovations of the Republic of Serbia in cooperation with the Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD), within the program of scientific and technological cooperation between the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Austria, for the period 2024–2026.
The goal of the panel was to demonstrate how bilingual speakers adapt Serbian verbs in the Gurbet variety of Romani. Emphasis was placed on the function of thematic vowels and the complexity of Serbian verbs, as well as how these factors influence the integration of verbs into Romani. The analysis draws on data collected from fieldwork in eastern Serbia (Knjaževac and Zaječar) and publicly available media content from central Serbia (Kruševac).
