Stories from the past

The anecdotes, jokes and stories you can hear and read in this section come from the publications listed below. We hope to continue adding new recordings from these and other collections of texts without original recordings, so come back and check this page out again.

• Lu fraţi nostri
  Most texts collected in 1927. and 1928.
• Texte istroromîne
  Texts collected in 1932. and 1933.
• Istrorumunjsko-hrvatski rječnik (s gramatikom i tekstovima)
  Texts collected between 1962. and 1967.

Since the middle of the 19th century, linguists and ethnologists had been intrigued by the existence of the Vlaški and Žejanski (Vlashki and Zheyanski, also, Istro-Romanian) linguistic enclaves on the Croatian peninsula of Istria. Many visited the Istrian villages where the language is spoken and they wrote down, and later published, anecdotes, jokes, and stories told by the men, women and, even, children they encountered on their study trips.

We wanted to make some of these stories more accessible to a wider audience and so started this community project, in which we record today's speakers of the language reading a selection of old texts for which audio recordings are not available.

If you are a speaker of Vlaški and Žejanski, you may notice, like some of our readers, that the language used in the stories is occasionally a bit odd, not quite the way you speak today. While some of the differences you are noticing may be due to  the original researchers' unintentional misinterpretation, more than likely,  the language has simply changed naturally over time. More than forty years have passed since even the most recent texts featured here were written down. Some words, for example, may have fallen out of use and been replaced by new ones. These differences are, therefore, not at all surprising.

We hope you'll enjoy listening to the stories as much as our readers enjoyed reading them for you.