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From different academic perspectives, the volume highlights realities of life and experiences of people in a diverse society on an individual, social, and political level, which are related to their ascribed non-normativity. The book combines different research approaches and results on intersectionality and marginalization discussing their relation to social cohesion. It contributes to a better understanding of how marginalized groups are marked as »not belonging« based on multiple dimensions and are systematically excluded in terms of participation and other democratic principles.

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In a world characterized by mobility and dynamic formations of cultural, linguistic, and social identities, the general understanding of languages – at least in Europe – still reflects hierarchies and classifications that are based on the 19th century-based nation-state ideology. This book deals with relevant aspects of language against the contemporary ideal of open, pluralistic societies, as well as with consequences on language of increasingly complex and diverse power relations, migration, globalization, and modern phenomena such as ICT.

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Drawing on users’ testimonials we discuss how peripatetic populations forge ideologies around their use of group-internal special vocabulary. We identify three recurring themes: The discourse of loss that purports to account for a language history marked by deprivation and anomaly and intertwined with a notion of incompleteness of one’s own identity; contemporary negotiation of identity that draws on external reference points to set boundaries towards others; and explications of language function, which reconstruct contexts of use. Our case studies involve the use of use of special vocabulary derived partly or mainly from Romani among English Gypsies, Norwegian Travellers, and the travelling Showpeople of northern Italy. We approach these Romani-based ‘special languages’ (‘Sondersprachen’) as acts of identity performance and revisit the hypothesis that they emerged through convergence between Romani speakers and indigenous peripatetic populations.

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The present paper investigates the reduction of gender assignment and agreement in a nineteenth-century Romani variety in contact with genderless Hungarian. This reduction took place within two generations of native speakers. We compare the geographical and sociolinguistic situation with the majority of present-day Romani varieties, which still maintain the original two-way (masculine, feminine) gender system. By comparing these varieties with the few Romani varieties which also display reduction of their gender system, we show that the development of this particular typological change may be the outcome of the minority situation of Romani and its geographical proximity to a genderless language. However, as rural varieties do not exhibit the same kind of erosion, this is not a sufficient explanation; what also appears to play a role in the Romani case is the urban context of the change. This sociolinguistic factor might also be considered in other case studies on the loss of grammatical gender.

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