Text Sources for Studying Language and Culture of Russian Roma: a Brief Literature Review

Abstract

The texts of Romani traditional discourse (folklore, oral history, patterns of speech, fragments of memoirs and ethnic history) are multi-dimensional sources of cultural studies. There is a lack of publications of Romani texts in Russia, given the diversification of the Russian Roma to a number of ethnic groups, each with significant language and cultural differences. In Russia, the publication of texts in the dialect of North Russian Roma began in the XIX century, the texts of the other groups (Servitka, Crimean Roma, Kalderash, Lovari, etc.) emerged in the twentieth century. The scientific analysis of texts was primarily linguistic in nature. Their commenting, folkloristic, ethnographic and other types of perspectives to textual analysis are developing nowadays. Some editions of the 1980–2000s do not meet the requirements of scientific expertise and cannot be used as reliable sources.