REF is proud to showcase the work of Law and Humanities Scholarship Program (LHP) beneficiaries: Artur Ivanenko, Natalia Tomenko, and Suizana Ivanenko, who received a small-scale REF grant to create a smartphone application that teaches the Romanes language.
According to project leader, Artur Ivanenko, the idea of designing an online application for teaching the Romani language came to his mind when he experienced among Roma youth and activist that only a small percentage can speak the Romanes language: “We started to discuss the issue as a destructive factor in the preservation of culture and its transmission to subsequent generations”. He continues, “during research, we found that the issue started to appear due to the fact that the Romani language is not a priority for study among the Roma of the 21st century. Thus, Roma youth do not have the opportunity to communicate among their peers with use of native language, and do not have additional skills to communicate with Roma representatives at international events. That is why we established an idea to create one interactive educational product that will teach or increase the level of knowledge of the Romani language among young people”.
REF’s LHP scholarship is co-financed by the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) and has been operating since 2007 in Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. The LHP scholarship includes a small-scale community project grant component. The grant is meant to promote and strengthen the philosophy of community participation among LHP current beneficiaries and alumni by helping them design and implement a community project. The project must help Roma communities develop a set of skills that will contribute to their further personal and professional development.
To create the app, the students teamed up with a linguist and a programmer to research and design the application. Over months of meetups in Kyiv, and rounds of testing, the app slowly came to life. Currently the app, Romanes is available to download on Android ios and the App Store in Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. On the day of release the team recorded 100 downloads, currently the app has been downloaded by 500 people. The team plans to expand the app into more regions and languages, as currently the app teaches Russian to Romanes and vice versa.
“I am proud to say that there was no app for studying the Romani language in Ukraine and our first step is a fundamental and responsible one” says Natalia Tomenko, who oversaw the graphic design of the project. She continues, “Being a member of the Roma community for me means to preserve traditions, customs and native language. In my family circle we do not use Romani as the main language and makes me feel uncomfortable in situations when people speak just Romani. It is my biggest dream one day start to speak fluently in Romani and enjoy the process. The creation of the app first of all will help me, my closest people and friends to study the language. I already started to get feedback from my parents and cousins with suggestions and offers what they would like to see in updates. Our team considered all of them and implemented them in the update which will be published soon in the app Romanes.”
“REF helped me learn to be a dentist and now I have the opportunity to help Roma in my city in this direction” says Artur. With the creation of the app, the team had three goals: “The first is to raise awareness of the Romani language. Even now, we have examples when a Roma girl from seventh grade who does not know the Romani language, began to learn it through the Romanes app. She wrote to us through social media and thanked us. She said that almost all of her classmates downloaded the app and began to learn the Romani language with. The second example is that recently our initiative group had the opportunity to communicate with a Roma activist who works on television, he also told a very interesting story, how non-Roma from his place of work were interested in the app and have already downloaded and started learning the language. Thanks to these examples, we see that the second goal – the destruction of stereotypes, according to the Roma culture, the popularization of the Roma language and identity, reach its goal. After all, the Roma and the non-Roma population/ teenagers also started to be interested in the app. The third goal of our team was to promote a new form of language learning for Ukrainian society”.
Take a look below for a sneak peak of the Romanes app:
