Issues of Language and Citizenship in the Roma Broadcast and Print Media of the Vojvodina Autonomous Province of Serbia

This paper focuses on the multilingual media context in the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina, underlining the role of local institutions in promoting and supporting a number of minority languages, in line with the city of Novi Sad’s historical legacy of multiculturalism. Special attention is devoted to the status of the Romani language by illustrating the efforts made by the Roma intellectual elite to increase the status of their endangered mother tongue at an official level and to tie it with struggles of democratic participation and emancipation, in accordance with the predications of the “linguistic citizenship” conceptual framework. In particular, the paper addresses the contribution of local media such as Public Broadcasting Service of Vojvodina programs in Romani language and the trilingual (English/Serbian/Romani) bulletin issued by the Roma Inclusion Office, the Dekada Roma u AP Vojvodini, to the improvement of the status and conditions of Roma communities in the region. The discussion argues that these media embody a remarkable democratic voice in the context of the Roma community’s participation to debates on language and citizenship in the daily multilingual urban life of Novi Sad.