Anna-Maria Sonnemann - Language Families in Contact: The Impact of Slavic on Romani

Language Contact and Bilingualism

Edited by

Volume

ISBN 9783110756043

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110756173

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110756241

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

This book is dedicated to my parents.

Writing this book which is based on my Habilitation thesis accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne in October 2021 would not have been possible without the professional and emotional support of many people.

First and foremost, I am enormously grateful to Yaron Matras for his invitation to publish the manuscript in the Language Contact and Bilingualism series at De Gruyter Mouton, for having been a great advisor over several years and for his appreciation of my work.

Very warm thanks go to my teachers of Romani Martin Glis and Iveta Kokyov and my long-standing mentors, supervisors and friends Sebastian Kempgen and Daniel Buni.

I want to thank Kirstin Brgen and Birgit Sievert for the very professional and kind cooperation during the process of preparing the manuscript for print, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly thorough revision of the manuscript and countless valuable hints which definitely helped to improve the quality of the book.

The questions and comments of Viktor Elk, Mirjana Miri, Nikola Rai and all the participants of the International Conference of Romani Linguistics 2020 and 2021 have been very helpful, just like the discussions with and hints by Norbert Boretzky, Christian Sappok, Manfred Krug, Achim Rabus, Nicolas Jansens, Birgit Hellwig and Eugen Hill.

Finally, but very importantly, I want to thank my parents Gudrun () and Herbert Meyer, my husband Till Sonnemann and his parents Gyburg and Jrgen, my life-coaches Luka Kadovi and Andrew Woods with Olina as well as my wonderful (former) colleagues in Bamberg and Cologne for always believing in me.

Bamberg, July 2022

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Romani, the language of the Roma, Sinti, Kal, Manua and other European people groups should be of relevance for Slavicists as well as the Slavic languages for Romologists, because the contact occurring between their respective languages is, so to speak, the case of language contact par excellence in Eastern Europe. Native speakers of Slavic languages and native speakers of Romani live in close proximity in Eastern, South-Eastern and Central Eastern Europe.

According to censuses and estimates, the Slavic-speaking countries with the largest number of Roma currently living there are Bulgaria, Slovakia and Serbia (cf. ); the actual numbers are, again, probably much higher. It is important to note, though, that the number of Roma does not equal the number of Romani speakers. In Romania for instance, but also in Hungary and elsewhere, many Roma speak Romanian, and there are more Roma than Romani speakers in other countries as well. Outside Europe, there are large Roma communities in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Australia, among others. Correspondingly, Romani thus represents one of the largest minority languages both within Europe and worldwide.

Fig. 1: Estimated percentage share of Roma in total population by country and Roma population in absolute numbers (status: 2010).

The language is one of the most important factors in the construction of Roma identity; they themselves refer to it as romanes (in different variants), literally in the manner of the Roma, or romani hib Roma language, from which the term Romani, commonly used in linguistics, is derived (which is the default mode of communication among Roma. In this case, the speaker switches freely between Romani, Russian and Ukrainian (the latter two are marked in italics).