The Team
Rossella Montibeler
Rossella Montibeler is a member of the Štivor community and serves as the secretary of the Association of Italians of Štivor – Club Trentini. She pursued her master’s studies at the Department of Italian Studies of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Banja Luka, where she currently works as a teaching assistant for the Italian language. She defended her master’s thesis on the use of audiovisual materials in teaching Italian and has published several articles on the topic of glottodidactics. During her studies, she participated in the EUniverciné project, a multilingual and multicultural initiative organized by the University of Nantes within the Erasmus+ program. In 2023, she passed the exam to become a certified court interpreter for the Italian language and has had several opportunities to work in the fields of translation and subtitling from Italian to Serbian and vice versa. In recent years, she has been actively involved in various projects aimed at preserving the dialect of her community, the Štivor dialect.
Marija Runić
Marija Runić is a linguist working at the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She earned her PhD in theoretical linguistics from the University of Padua, focusing on an endangered Slavic language spoken in the Italian Alps. Her research interests include formal linguistics, particularly syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, sociolinguistics, and language issues in education. During 2019-2020, she was a Fulbright scholar at Western Washington University, conducting research on linguistics and education in post-conflict societies. Marija Runić primarily focuses on Romance and Slavic languages in contact situations and explores sociolinguistic dynamics in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Outside academia, she works as a consultant for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the language industry. She is also active in language advocacy through various projects related to the description, documentation, and revitalization of endangered and minority languages, promoting metalinguistic awareness, and combating linguistic discrimination both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally.
Pavel Falaleev
Pavel Falaleev is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He works as an hourly paid lecturer of Serbian/Croatian in the Department of Modern Languages of the Faculty of Arts at the same university. In 2022, he held a course on Balkan onomastics at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki. He has also taught various Slavonic languages (Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian) at Finnish Adult Education Centers of Helsinki and Espoo. His research interests include Slavonic languages, Romance languages and the Balkan Sprachbund. He wrote both his BA and MA theses on Turkish loanwords in Serbian/Croatian. His doctoral thesis explores the language contact between the dialect of Štivor and Serbian.
