Book Description

A language of Indic origin heavily infuenced by European idioms for many centuries now, Romani provides an interesting experimental field for students of language contact, linguistic minorities, standardization, and typology. Approaching the language via its ever-surfacing character as a language in contact, the volume gives expression to part of the wide range or research represented in today's field of Romani linguistics. Contributions focus on problems in typological change and structural borrowing, lexical borrowing and lexcial reconstruction, the Iranian influence on the language, interdialectal interference, language mixing, Romani influences on slang and argot, grammatical categories in discourse, standardization and literacy in a multilingual community, and plagiarism of data in older sources. The authors discuss dialects spoken in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Serbia, Macedonia, Germany, Poland, and Romania, as well as related varieties in Spain and the Middle East.