ATTITUDES OF PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS TOWARDS BOYASH ROMANIAN AND TOWARDS THE SUBJECT ‘LANGUAGE AND CULTURE OF THE ROMA NATIONAL MINORITY IN CROATIA’

Abstract

Although it was officially adopted at the beginning of 2020, the curriculum of the school subject Language and culture of the Roma national minority in primary and secondary schools of the Republic of Croatia (model C) began to be applied only from the school year 2022/2023, when in the primary schools Kuršanec, Orehovica and Podturen the teaching of this subject started. The mentioned schools
1 Istraživanje je provedeno uz svesrdan angažman učiteljice Natalije Sklepić kojoj iskreno zahvaljujem na suradnji, susretljivosti i velikoj pomoći, bez nje ovo istraživanje ne bi bilo moguće. Să fij sănătósă!
58 | Petar R. Radosavljević
teach Boyash Romanian, i. e. the Transylvanian dialect, a variety of Romanian spoken by practically all Roma in Međimurje, while in the rest of Croatia more than three quarters of the Roma national minority also speak varieties of Romanian. Although Boyash Romanian could already be encountered in schools in Međimurje, this was mostly informal, while now the language is formally part of the teaching process. Since Boyash Romanian is a non-standardized idiom that is predominantly oral and the materials for learning and teaching are scarce, in this paper we will look at the peculiarities, challenges and difficulties in teaching this subject. The main part of this paper presents and analyses the attitudes of Orehovica and Podturen primary school students that attend the subject Language and culture of the Roma national minority towards Boyash Romanian and towards the mentioned school subject that were examined through an anonymous questionnaire.