Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, PhD (principal research fellow at the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade), is the leader of the VLingS project. She is a sociolinguist with a special interest in the ethnic communities speaking Romance varieties in the Balkans. In the last 15 years, the focus of her research have been the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia, the Bayash in the Balkans, the Megleno-Romanians in Serbia, as well as Serbian language acquisition in neighboring Romania. She is the author of a monograph on the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia, the co-editor of a volume on the Romance-speaking Balkans, and of a volume on Bayash studies.
Svetlana Ćirković, PhD (senior research associate of the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade), is the coordinator of two work packages of the VLingS project: “Fieldwork research” and “Documenting and archiving vulnerable linguistic varieties”. Her fields of research are sociolinguistics, Romani and Balkan linguistics. For many years, she has documented Serbian and Romani dialects, collected oral narratives about traditional culture, and worked on archiving audio and video recordings resulted from sociolinguistic fieldwork. She has trained young researchers in fieldwork methodology, linguistic documentation and data archiving. Svetlana Ćirković is the author of a monograph on displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija, co-author of a Romani-Serbian dictionary and of a monograph on the Gurbet Romani dialect in Eastern Serbia from the perspective of contact linguistics.
Mirjana Mirić, PhD (senior research associate of the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade), is the coordinator of the work package “Linguistic vulnerability assessment” of the VLingS project. Her fields of research are language acquisition, Romani and Balkan linguistics. She is using corpus, experimental and quantitative methods in data collection and analysis. She has written several articles about the less documented Gurbet variety of Romani spoken in eastern Serbia and about Romani-Serbian language contact. She is the co-author of a Romani-Serbian dictionary and of a monograph on the Gurbet Romani dialect in Eastern Serbia from the perspective of contact linguistics.
Dalibor Sokolović, PhD (associate professor of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade), is a linguist whose focus of research are Slavic language minority communities, such as the Slovaks and Poles in Vojvodina and Lusatian Sorbs in Germany. His areas of research cover language policy and language planning of Slavic minority communities, bilingualism and bilingual education, revitalization of endangered Slavic languages. He advocates for a polycentric standardization of minority languages, and the use of the ecolinguistic approach. Dalibor Sokolović is the author of Poljaci u Srbiji/Poles in Serbia/Polacy w Serbii, co-author of the monographs Jugosławia wobec Serbołużyczan i Łużyc w latach 1945-1949 and Južnoslovenski i zapadnoslovenski standardni jezici u svetlu planiranja jezika, and of the textbook Преглед историје словачког стандардног језика. He is an active member of Slavic organizations, former vice president of the Slavic Society of Serbia and current vice president of the Association of Slavic Societies of Serbia.
Valentina Sokolovska, PhD (full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad), is a sociologist whose focus of research is the sociology of ethnicity, apart from demographic issues and applying statistical methods in sociological research. She has extensive research experience and has participated in the development of several questionnaires for the collection of language data, both nationally and internationally. She is the author of numerous papers and articles on language as a means of maintaining ethnic identity, on the social and cultural potential of the Roma ethnic community. She has authored a monograph on the acculturation of ethnic groups and edited a volume of studies on regions and regionalization.
Janko Ramač, PhD (full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad), historian by formation, has a wide range of scientific interests. His main area of research is the history of Ruthenians in Southern Hungary/Yugoslavia. He is also interested in the language, cultural history and folklore of Ruthenians and Ukrainians, and has done extensive research on the past of Slovaks in Vojvodina and Slovak-Ruthenian cultural, literary and educational relations. He has published several books on the history of Ruthenians, and more than 100 papers on various topics related to this ethnic group, such as old Ruthenian manuscript chronicles, old manuscripts of spiritual poetry and prose, Ruthenian correspondence from the 18th and 19th centuries, and legal acts. In his pedagogical work, along with compiling textbooks for students, he also prepared supplements from the history of Ruthenians for history textbooks for primary and high schools in the Ruthenian language.
Mirjana Ćorković, PhD (assistant professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade), is the coordinator of the “Dissemination of results” work package of the VLingS project. She has extensive experience in researching the language, literature and culture of the Romanian minority in Vojvodina from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on cultural memory and the construction of identity. She is the author of several papers on language ideology in the Romanian literature in Vojvodina, language education policy of the EU and Serbia, and the status of minority and regional languages in the Serbian education system.
Stefana Paunović Rodić, PhD (assistant professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade), is a Slovak language specialist. Her research covers the following areas: contrastive linguistics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender studies, linguocultural studies, lexicology and phraseology. As a practical result of her doctoral dissertation, she offered a unique methodology for a controlled electronic associative test without the presence of a researcher; the collected and analyzed material was presented in the dissertation, in the form of a parallel associative dictionary of Slovak and Serbian. She has a special interest in the sociolinguistic status of the Slavic languages spoken by minority communities.
Maja Miličević Petrović, PhD, is involved in the VLingS project as an external collaborator, and will be working on data analysis in the final project year. She is an associate professor at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, having previously worked at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Her research interests include morphosyntax, different bilingual situations, methods of language data collection and quantitative analysis. She co-authored a book on experimental methods in second language acquisition research, and has participated in the creation of several publicly available corpora, as well as open educational resources, primarily within the ReLDI and UPSKILLS projects.
Anđela Redžić, MA (junior research assistant of the Institute for Balkan Studies), is interested in Balkan linguistics, the Prizren-Timok dialects of the Serbian language, substandard varieties, such as boškački, the secret language of craftsmen in Serbia, Bulgaria and Northern Macedonia. Her fields of research cover corpus linguistics and ethnolinguistics. In her doctoral thesis, she analyzes the syntax of cases in the Serbian dialect of the Sirinić region from the perspective of Balkan linguistics.
Dušan Vlajić, MA (teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš), is a psychologist trained in constructing and empirically assessing the reliability and validity of psychological tests. He has experience in working with different types of tests and questionnaires, interpretation of individual results, as well as assessing the psychometric characteristics of psychological tests.
Neda Pons, PhD, research consultant, has relevant experience in collecting and analyzing qualitative sociolinguistic data. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined the meanings that modern Sephardic Jews, scattered around the world and gathered in the virtual community of Ladinokomunita, attribute to the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) language as an element of their ethnic identity. Based on the analysis and interpretation of the speakers’ attitudes and ideologies, she developed basic guidelines for the preservation and revitalization of this endangered linguistic variety.
Biljana Radić-Bojanić, PhD (full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad) is a linguist whose research has dealt with various sociolinguistic fields since her MA thesis, which was a revolutionary investigation of online language 25 years ago. This is simultaneously the topic which she has pursued in her later work, publishing a book about Facebook as a social network and several research papers that have tackled online sociolinguistics. In addition, she has done extensive research with Serbian immigrants abroad, investigating the ethnolinguistic vitality of Serbian as a minority language, e.g. in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands, which has also resulted in the publication of research articles.
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