The paper presents the results of research conducted among Russian Roma children. Two groups of children, 6-8 years and 8-10 years old, were tested with a Romani Language Assessment Test. The study was conducted in a Roma settlement of a small town not far from Moscow. The children were tested on different grammatical categories in Romani as their home language. The grammatical knowledge of the children about their home language is not considered to be used by the Russian teachers in classroom. The frame of Cummins (2015) “teaching through an intercultural lens” is taken as the starting point of the research. The research results showed that the Roma children at the age between 6-8 years know the most complex grammatical categories of Romani as their mother tongue, however children’s knowledge is not used by the teachers at school environment teaching Russian. There are no lessons in Romani as the mother tongue strengthening the children’s linguistic and cognitive abilities.

In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights decided the case of Horváth and Kiss v. Hungary in favor of the two Romani boys who alleged that they had been misdiagnosed as ‘mildly mentally retarded’ and consequently placed and retained in a special school for their whole primary education. This, they claimed, deprived them of the educational opportunity to pursue their chosen vocational interests. In this research note, I will provide a brief view of the history of special education in Hungary, and the history of mental retardation in its medical/pedagogic connections. I will suggest that the Court’s decision, while a positive development, fails to address the fundamental systemic racism of the entire medico/educational system in Hungary, and that until that more radical change is undertaken, a disproportionate number of Romani children will continue to be officially and unofficially treated as mentally deficient.

The representation of the Romani culture in Western popular culture has long been based on stereotypes and prejudices of those who are not part of it. These stereotypes have shaped the common perception of the Romani. Cultural studies are focused on literature relevant in the postcolonial and critical discourse analysis. In the works created for the D&D games set in the fictional world of Ravenloft, one can find the Vistani, an ethnic group inspired by the Romani. What is shown here is how the portrayal of the Vistani coincides with the stereotypes pointed out by researchers in popular depictions of the Romani culture and how the viewers receive such characterizations nowadays. This exploratory study points out how the stereotypes and culture coding work in speculative fiction (namely fantasy genre) and how the portrayal of fictional culture could have real-world implications.