This volume contributes to research on the ‘intersection of language, nationalism, and identity politics’ (4) of the Eastern Romance Balkans. The chapters address questions of identity and ideology, construed widely and from different perspectives and frameworks. Issues of politics, nationalism, history, culture, religion, and literature are situated in communities of Aromanian, Moldovan-Italian, Megleno-Romanian, and Judezmo speakers.
In the first chapter, Michael Studemund-Halévy discusses the social role of scripts used by Judeo-Spanish communities in the Balkans, including Cyrillic and Rashi in Judezmo/Ladino, the language of Spanish-Jewish Balkan communities. Cătălin Mamali explores the cultural and political history of the Aromanian community and considers the construction and circulation of Aromanian identity in the post-Soviet Balkans. Finally, Mamali offers thoughts on the preservation and future of the Aromanian community. In the third chapter, Anna-Christine Weirich discusses the role of the Italian language as an economic resource in Moldova. Economic mobility in Moldova has created a source of contact between Italian and Moldovan and has led to discourse on the purity of the Moldovan language. In chapter 4, Ewa Nowicka writes about the history of migration and settlement within the Balkans and raises questions of authenticity among the Eastern Romance groups.
In chapter 5, Daniela-Carmen Stoica explores the identity of the Aromanian community in the Korçë region of South-Eastern Albania. Stoica uses personal narratives in the form of oral histories as sociolinguistic data and invokes concepts of indexicality, positioning, and dialogism to describe the process of identity construction in local narratives. Mircea Măran follows with an exploration of the Megleno-Romanians of the Serbian Banat, who migrated to the region as a result of Yugoslav Macedonian colonization after World War II. The Megleno-Romanians were nearly forgotten after assimilation with local cultures, however their history is preserved by the work of historians, linguists, and ethnologists who interviewed the last remaining descendants of the community. Zvjezdana Vrzić then describes ideologies of nation and identity as the Vlashki/Zheyanski communities of Croatia's Istrian peninsula pursue linguistic rights and national recognition. Vrzić discusses how state and local language ideologies affect the maintenance of the Vlashki/Zheyanski language and culture.
In chapter 8, Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković characterizes the Bayash community of the Balkans, representing many Eastern Romance communities, though they are not always recognized by educational institutions. In the final chapter, Monica Huţanu addresses contemporary issues of identity performance on the internet and the enregisterment of Vlach Romanian on Facebook. Huţanu invokes indexicality and metapragmatics to explicate the indexical field of Vlach Romanian. Performance of the Vla na kvadrat/Vlauca/Vlaurda identities occurs through phonetic and lexical features and metapragmatic practices through memes.
In sum, the volume provides an appropriately diverse approach to the study of Balkan Romance identity through a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks applied to understudied communities of the region. One feature uniting each author's perspective is the role of individual and community agency in the construction and performance of social identity. The blending of anthropological, sociolinguistic, and historical approaches to identity provides meaningful access points for Balkanists in any discipline.
