There has been no extensive collection of Anglo-Romani material since Sampson systematically gathered linguistic data on inflected British Romani from the Kale all over Wales and provided a detailed analysis of his findings in Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1926). Whilst there have been extensive wordlists (Dawson 2006, Hayward 2003) and sociolinguistic descriptions (Kenrick 1971) published in recent times, there have been no attempts at a detailed linguistic analysis based on a corpus. For example, no previous publications have looked at the competence of individual speakers, the differences in the regional varieties and whether these differences are a result of variation between the original continental dialects which arrived in Britain.
The Anglo-Romani Project, based at the University of Manchester, is a two-year (ESRC funded) project, aiming to document the Anglo-Romani lexicon and its regional and dialectal variation. The project has been in its pilot stage for the past six months. This contribution will report on the findings of the pilot project as well as the preparations for the larger two-year project.
The contribution will give details of the project strategy, which involves working in speaker communities, methods of data collection and electronic transcription and data storage as well as summarising our initial findings.
Most Romani scholars broadly agree to label Caló as a rather isolated variety of Romani spoken in Spanish-speaking territory and classified into the Northern branch. Varieties, such as a Caló, in which only an important amount of Romani-derived lexicon has survived with the original morphosyntactic structure completely lost, are referred to as Para-Romani varieties in contemporary Romani linguistics.
According to recent research, Caló cannot be said to be completely extinct although sometimes it has been wrongly presumed to be so in the linguistic literature. A more accurate estimate would be to assume that Caló is perhaps in the final stages that will almost certainly lead to its total extinction. The present work is based on a wide variety of written sources rather than fieldwork. Although the reliability of some of the material used can be called into question, I´m not going to embark on a critical assessment of the sources but rather discuss the immense value that through an etymological analysis should be placed on the lexical items present in the more or less extensive repertoires that form the basis of this contribution.
First, I briefly discuss some sociolinguistic factors that could lead to the formation of Caló as a special vocabulary deprived of its original grammatical system. Then, I discuss the phonological interference that Caló shows due to its contact with Castilian and above all I look into how the phonological adaptation of many lexical items in Caló can be largely attributed to contact with meridional Spanish varieties. After that, I offer a selection of etymological proposals for lexical items with unknown or unclear etymologies. I also focus on those items which have undergone certain phonological and semantic developments. By providing an etymological analysis of those items which are only attested in Caló, I introduce new ideas into the early history of this dialect and the migration routes followed by its speakers. The analysis of some items provides revealing insights into the culture of Spanish Gypsies that are likely to be valuable from an anthropological point of view.
The first documentary evidence of the Romani language in Spain is found in a dramatic work dated roughly in the second half of the 16th century. In the play, a Gypsy couple use words whose Romani character is beyond doubt, although the interpretation of the sentences in which they appear is very difficult. This attestation was recorded by Carlos Claveria many years ago, but it has gone practically unnoticed since then and, to my knowledge, no attempt at an interpretation has been made.
This paper edits the passages in question and suggests an analysis that would confirm the very Romani character of the words used. If this analysis is correct, the Auto del finamiento de Jacob can be regarded as one of the oldest attestations of the Romani language in the world: although the precise date of the work is unsure, the copy of the codex where it appears can be confidently situated in the last third of the 16th century, and the dramatic works contained there are dated between 1550 and 1575.