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This paper describes some linguistic peculiarities of Romani-origin words in the ethnolinguistic repertoire of the Romungros (ERR), a non-standard Hungarian variety spoken by the descendants of South Central Romani speakers. Based on empirical data, we examine various linguistic features, showing that ERR exhibits reduced morphological complexity alongside increased lexical and phonological complexity. We demonstrate that the innovative features of ERR, such as its flexibility in incorporating Romani roots, the use and the reinterpretation of Romani linguistic features and the violations of the grammatical rules of standard Hungarian are rooted in linguistic creativity and serve to mark group identity.
 

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This paper examines the use of spatial adverbs and preverbs, such as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘in’ or ‘out’, in combination with toponyms in directional and local expressions in a number of nonstandard varieties of Alpine Gallo-Romance, Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian, Romani, Upper German and Slovenian. This feature has been described as a form of geocentric orientation system that refers to salient landmarks characteristic for the route between a reference point and a remote place, such as a river or a mountain. However, the adverbs and preverbs do not serve as an orientation system per se but rather enable a speaker to perspectivize his/her utterance. The choice of an adverb or preverb depends on the speaker’s sociogeographic point of view which is, in turn, shaped by the community a speaker belongs to. Our paper aims at offering a different approach towards this feature by analyzing the social references, the pragmatic function as well as the use of these adverbs and preverbs with regard to aspect and aktionsart. Based on this, we propose a function-based approach to explain the fact that this feature is found in a variety of languages since we consider topography-based models not to be sufficient to explain the spread of this feature over the topographically diverse regions and typologically diverse languages of southern Central Europe.
 

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This article examines a significant but often overlooked moment in Romani activism: a petition for equal linguistic rights submitted by Hungarian Roma to the Austrian Emperor in 1850. Using contemporary sources and the Discourse-Historical Approach, we reconstruct the event, explore its context, and analyse media portrayals of Roma and their language. We identify dominant discourses of nationhood, belonging, and inequality, and highlight three grassroots initiatives that reflect early efforts by Roma to voice their political concerns.

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