What is the Romani Language?

What is the Romani Language?
Author: Peter Bakker
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2000
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9781902806068

This book deals with the Romani language. It does not teach the readers to speak the language. Rather, it deals with its origin, its current use and status, its beginning literature and films, and the way it is learned by children and much more. It shows that Romani is a language in its own right, with its own, unique grammatical system, dialects, and particular norms of language use. Pressure from the outside world has diminished the use of the language in some areas, but generally it is a thriving language, spoken by millions of people.

Learn Romani

Learn Romani
Author: Ronald Lee
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1902806441

Romani has many dialects and no standard written form. This course of language lessons is based on the Romani language as spoken by the Kalderash Roma in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The course is designed for lay people, and any grammatical and linguistic terms are explained in plain English.

The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics

The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics
Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 599
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030281051

Romani is the first language, and family and community language, of upwards of 3-4 million people and possibly many more in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Documentation and research on the language draws on a tradition of more than two centuries, yet it remains relatively unknown and often engulfed by myths. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the language including language maintenance and educational projects, the creation of digital resources, language policy initiatives, and a flourishing community of online users of the language. This Handbook presents state of the art research on Romani language and linguistics. Bringing together key established scholars in the field of linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, it introduces the reader to the structures of Romani and its dialect divisions, and to the history of research on the language. It then goes on to explore major external influences on the language through contact with other key languages, aspects of language acquisition, and interventions in support of the language through public policy provisions, activism, translation, religious and literary initiatives, and social media. This comprehensive and groundbreaking account of Romani will appeal to students and scholars from across language and linguistics.

Romani

Romani
Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2002-06-06
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1139433245

Romani is a language of Indo-Aryan origin which is spoken in Europe by the people known as 'Gypsies' (who usually refer to themselves as Rom). There are upwards of 3.5 million speakers, and their language has attracted increasing interest both from scholars and from policy-makers in governments and other organizations during the past ten years. This 2002 book is the first comprehensive overview in English of Romani. It provides a historical linguistic introduction to the structures of Romani and its dialects, as well as surveying the phonology, morphology, syntactic typology and patterns of grammatical borrowing in the language. This book provides an essential reference for anyone interested in this fascinating language.

Romani in Britain

Romani in Britain
Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-10-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0748687017

A comprehensive academic work dedicated to the unique speech form of English Romanies/Gypsies often called 'Anglo-Romani'.

Romani in Contact

Romani in Contact
Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027236291

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.

The Typology and Dialectology of Romani

The Typology and Dialectology of Romani
Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027236615

Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies), the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers, the distribution of inflectional, agglutinative, and analytic formation among syntactic categories, regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation, suppletion, aspects of syntactic convergence, and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals, with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology, Functional Sentence Perspective, Functional Grammar, functional-pragmatic typology, and general grammaticalization theory. Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language, and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties, to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey, to codified varieties in Macedonia, and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects, including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.

Romani Dictionary

Romani Dictionary
Author: Ronald Lee
Publisher: Magoria Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2010
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0981162649

Compiled by a native Romani speaker, this reference covers and differentiates European and North American Kalderash terms and Romani grammar. Prefaced by a grammatical primer, containing more than 12,000 lexical items, and filled with countless real-world examples of idiomatic usage, the text is an indispensable resource for anyone looking to learn or work with Kalderash Romani.

We are the Romani People

We are the Romani People
Author: Ian F. Hancock
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781902806198

The author, himself a Romani, speaks directly to the gadze (non-Gypsy) reader about his people, their history since leaving India one thousand years ago and their rejection and exclusion from society in the countries where they settled, their health, food, culture and society.