Balkan Nomads Oral Material Annotated & Documented

During a research project financed by FWF the last nomadic shepherds in the border triangle Albania Greece Republic Macedonia were interviewed using their own mother tongues and dialects. The aim of the project was the documentation and analysis of the shepherds` everyday life in light of the fact that drastic changes have taken place after the end of the Ottoman Empire, especially considering the gradual process of their becoming sedentary. The field recordings, containing interviews with Albanian, Aromanian, Greek and Slavic Macedonian shepherds, have been archived in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, inventoried, listed and protocoled. The data provides availability and usability for scientific users who use the archive in Vienna, but, until now, they are neither published nor quotable. There has not yet been the technical possibility for a publication form that could have made the linguistic material in connection with the AFV material quotable and freely accessible to a wider audience. The commission Vanishing Languages and Cultural Heritage, established at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2016, will offer a new publication platform, which allows fieldwork data and materials to be remastered into a suitable form for open access and a presentation to the wider public. The material which is going to be published offers cultural-geographic and ethno- linguistic documentation from Albania, Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, which documents the changes mobile pastoral societies have experienced or are still experiencing during the process of becoming sedentary. In terms of contents, the collection provides material concerning animal species, trails, pastures, the herd, species and breeds, physical and economic characteristics, reproduction, jars, tools, marking of the animals, disease and death, waste and by-products, personnel, products, slaughter and meat processing, settlements and buildings, the social organization of the family and the herd, transport and caring for the animals. The open narrative construction of the interviews provided an opportunity to not only collect terminology and vocabulary but also record folk tales, biographies, songs and other valuable material. The BalkaNOMAD online publication will be the first annotated documentation on descriptive fieldwork in original languages (Aromanian, Albanian, Greek, Macedonian), dedicated to shepherds as an important field of the Balkan people. It will give insights into pastoral life in Southeast Europe to everybody. The online database will have an innovative multimedia format, combining audio, photo, video and annotation (exp. bilingual subtitles), so that every use an follow the interviews without any knowledge of the four Balkan languages. The project also will have a beneficial impact on the increase of interest in the culture of the involved people and will be an important contribution to the knowledge of endangered languages and dialects and to their preservation for the next generation.