Istro-Romanians Erotic

The Istro-Romanians are one of Europe's smallest surviving language communities — a few hundred speakers, scattered across a handful of villages on the eastern slope of Mount Učka in Croatian Istria. Žejane sits on the northern side of the mountain; Šušnjevica and a cluster of smaller settlements — Nova Vas, Jesenovik, Letaj, Brdo — lie on the southern side. The two clusters speak noticeably different variants and have, for most of their history, thought of themselves as distinct. The umbrella term "Istro-Romanian" is largely a linguist's convenience.

Their language is the smallest and most isolated branch of Eastern Romance, separated from Romanian proper by roughly a thousand years and several hundred miles of Slavic-speaking territory. It is recognizably a sister to Romanian — the core vocabulary, the Latin grammatical bones — but heavily reshaped by centuries of contact with Croatian, which supplies much of the everyday lexicon and has pulled the grammar in unexpected directions. UNESCO classifies it as severely endangered, and the realistic speaker count keeps drifting downward; almost everyone under fifty is more comfortable in Croatian.

How they got to Istria is genuinely unsettled. The dominant theory traces them to transhumant shepherds from the Dinaric interior — Vlachs, in the older Balkan sense — who drifted west and were resettled on depopulated Istrian land sometime between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, after plague and Venetian-Ottoman warfare had emptied the peninsula. Local oral tradition and older surnames are consistent with this, but the chain of evidence is thin and competing reconstructions exist. They have called themselves Rumeri or Vlasi at various points; the label "Istro-Romanian" was attached from outside.

Religiously they are Roman Catholic, which has been the case long enough that it functions as an unmarked baseline rather than a distinguishing feature — the line that separates them from their neighbors is language, not faith. Žejane retains a carnival tradition, the zvončari bell-ringers, that is shared with surrounding Croatian villages and was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009; it is one of the few cultural practices that still draws outsiders to the village in any number.

What the community looks like now is mostly a story of emigration. Substantial Istro-Romanian populations live in New York, particularly Queens, and in Australia, sustained by family networks that have outlasted the villages themselves. Revitalization efforts — a small school program, dictionaries, recordings — exist, but the demographic arithmetic is difficult.