A “grimm” assumption on language
One of my biggest disappointments with movies, TV-series and any other artistic or cultural form is bad or incorrect representation. On the internet and not only I have encountered many people who have a certain level of xenophobia and call Romanian people gypsies. Sometimes they do it as an insult, other times, they really do say it with the belief that all Romanians are indeed gypsies.
The fact that we have a long and strenuous relationship with the gypsies is undeniable, but they still represent a minority in this country, one that has a very different culture as compared to the Romanian one. Often times, foreigners calling Romanians gypsies creates more of a friction in between the two cultures.
One of my most recent disappointments was when I was watching the TV series Grimm; one of my favorites. In the show, Iranian born actress Shohreh Aghdashloo plays Stefania Vaduva Popescu, a gypsy witch of sorts. While the show tries to be very clear about her origin, my surprise came when she started speaking in broken Romanian. I understand that for many people Romani language and Romanian might seem like the same language as they have similar names but, they honestly aren’t similar in the slightest. I suppose though, Romanian was the easier and more affordable language to tackle in an American TV-show that has limited budget, but it still does not soothe my conflicted heart. I consider Romanian to be a beautiful language, same can be said with Romani language, but to misrepresent it like that is a bit insulting.
As we watch movies and TV series, we rarely try to understand the language of a character if it is not the main language or if we don’t know it or recognize it, but as they are artistic forms which will probably survive centuries, I believe it is important to create proper representation.
It is true that Romanian gypsies know Romanian and they use it daily, but they still use their language a lot, it’s one of the main reasons they have been able to preserve it while being mostly analphabets. While this situation is not present only in the TV-series Grimm, it is one of the most recent events in this respect since the prevalence of the world-wide-web and it should be brought to light as a n unfavorable example to follow.
