Saving the Dialectological and Ethnographic Archival Material Preserved in Chişinău, Republic of Moldova (EAP1248)

Aims and objectives

This project will secure, digitise and make available for research the dialectological collection of the former Institute of Language and Literature of the Moldovan branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, currently owned by the Institute of Romanian Philology “Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu” in Chişinău. The collection consists of valuable dialectological notes, ethnographic descriptions and folkloric creations of the Romanian-speaking communities living in the USSR, recorded between 1946 and 1991 on 608 reel tapes and 356 volumes of manuscripts. A wide-ranging area is covered, from the Carpathians to Caucasia, but most of the material comes from between the rivers Prut and Dniester (nowadays the Republic of Moldova and part of Ukraine). Research of the pre-modern dialectological peculiarities and the traditional way of life of these communities will be significantly facilitated.