Istorie orală în textele dialectale
Oral History in Dialect Texts

Summary/Abstract: Originally collected with the aim of illustrating dialectal differences, Dialect Texts are an important source of oral historic information. As, in Romania, such texts were gathered as soon as the begining of the twentieth century, they make available to the research older data then any living person can offer today. The paper presents two important corpora of Romanian Dialect Texts, Graiul nostru (Our Speech), published by I.-A. Candrea, Ov. Densusianu and Th. Sperantia in 1906-1907, and Arhiva Fonogramică a Limbii Române (The Phonogramic Archive of Romanian Language), a rich collection of audio-tapes, initiated in 1956 and continuing to this day, partially published (see Anexa). In Graiul nostru, personal memory reaches as far as the reign of Al. I. Cuza and the Independence War of 1877. Recollection mingels with tradition, in narrating events as well as in portraying the Other, i.e. the Turkish or the Russian. Ideology and policy in the second half of the last century prevented any conversation between strangers - like the interviewer and the local speaker were - about recent historical events (World War II, the communist regime, collectivization of agriculture, let alone the anti-communist resistance). Only older facts are documented in AFLR, like World War I and the peasants uprising of 1907. But even texts on family matters and conflicts can yeald interesting information in the field of the History of Mentalities, for instance on the peasant's sense of property and on his relationship to death. Incidently, informations thus gathered can help understanding the psychology of the anti­-communist resistance.

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