New on the Bookshelf
Voicing Plurality in an Open World
Edited by: Oana Hergenröther, Angelika Heiling, Agnes Grond, Daniela Unger-Ullmann
Year of publication: 2024
Publisher: Reichert
Summary:
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.
Ideologies and identity performance in users’ discourses about Romani-based special languages (‘Sondersprachen’)
Autors:
Year of Publication: 2024
Journal: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, online first article, pp. 1–12
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Summary:
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.
Gender reduction in contact: The case of Romani in nineteenth-century Hungary
Autors:
Year of Publication: 2023
Journal: Diachronica, online first article, pp. 1–31
Publisher: John Benjamins
Summary:
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.
The origin of the self-appellation Sinti: A historical and linguistic examination
Author: Daphne Reitinger
Year of publication: 2023
Journal: Romani Studies 33 (2), pp. 157–187
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Summary:
The origin of the self-appellation Sinti has been the subject of investigation for well over 200 years. In the wake of the discovery of the Indo-Aryan affiliation of Romani, one of the earliest sources (Biester 1793) mentioning the term 'Sinte' interprets it as der wahre Name (the true name) of all Gypsies and allocates its origin to the province Sindh of the Indian sub-continent (Biester 1793: 365-366). More recently, Matras (1999, 2019) argued for the term Sinti to be a European borrowing in Romani due to its employment of inflectional patterns characteristic of European loanwords. In this paper, early attestations of this self-appellation with regard to their dialectological inferences are examined and an underlying root sint is ascertained. Via the Middle High German etymon sint, in the meaning of “way, road, journey”, and the German collective and appellative suffix -e, the meaning of Sinti is interpreted as “wayfarers” or “those who journey”.