Phonogrammarchiv Bulgarien

In order to preserve the cultural knowledge transported via the spoken language of these last remaining native speakers, it is now very necessary to document Bulgarian Judezmo, i.e. the traditions, rituals, songs (kantes, kantikas), poems (poeziyas, piyutim), proverbs (riflanes), sayings (dichas), tales, fairy tales (kuentos, konsejikas), riddles (enigmas), recipes (rechetas), letters and postcards, etc. spoken and written by native speakers with native words, native pronunciation, syntax, and morphology. Or to collect bad words making audio or videotaped recordings of the remaining speakers, collecting (older) sound recordings, planning a lexical database assembled during the process of transcribing and translating the interview. The objective of this project is thus to improve the to date mostly written linguistic documentation of Bulgarian Judezmo, the most endangered variety of Balkan Judezmo, collecting and registering data, ”gathering of metadata in the form of thoroughly annotations of the contexts in which materials are gathered, with commentaries on different aspects of the situation, speakers, etc., especially with respect to the ways in which the linguistic materials are collected“ and to preserve it not only for linguists and anthropologists, but also for further generations of the Bulgarian Sefardic community.