Dieter W. Halwachs & Gerd Ambrosch

University of Graz (Austria)

Burgenland Romani: ten years after…

Burgenland Romani – self-designation ‘Roman’ – is an isolated Romani variety of the so called ‘Vend’ group of the South Central dialects of Romani. It is spoken by some hundred speakers who primarily live in the easternmost federal state of Austria, the Burgenland. With the self-organisation of the Burgenland-Roma at the end of the 1980s ‘Roman’ became the group’s primary identity marker; although respectively just because it was (and to a lesser extent still is) threatened by language death. Due to their socio-historical situation Burgenland Roma were undergoing rapid language shift and Burgenland Romani only was used in a few linguistic enclaves by some families and even among these speakers it was functionally limited to special situations and it was only seen as the language of the old respectively the language of the past.

In 1993 representatives of the Burgenland Roma started a project to document their Romani variety for practical reasons: as future language teaching, for the use in the media, etc. This was quite an unique undertaking: (Mostly) Young members of an ethnic group, threatened by language loss initiated a collaboration with a group of (mostly) young linguists to codify their language to counteract language death. In 1996 work resulted in a writing system, a grammatical description and a first glossary. This was the starting point of Burgenland Romani as a language of the media, as a language of school and other public situations. Burgenland Romani functionally expanded into formal domains and changed from an oral language to a written language. Parallel to this development dynamics gradually moved from linguists to activists, more precisely: language use – teaching, translation, text production for the media, public occasions, etc – gained more and more importance and language documentation respectively language description slowly took a back seat.

‘Ten Years After’, it seems to be appropriate to have a closer look at the changes Burgenland Romani has undergone because of the codification process and the resulting functional expansion. These changes not only affected language attitude and language use among the Burgenland Roma and the functionality of ‘Roman’ but also its structures. Besides sociolinguistic changes the paper mainly will deal with structural changes caused by the use of ‘Roman’ as a written language.

Anna Rácová

Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava (Slovakia)

Slovak Carpathian Romani in a new social and political context

In 1991 the Roma were formally and legally recognized as a national minority in the Slovak Republic. In 1999 the National Council of the Slovak Republic approved the proposal for the usage of languages of national minorities (including Romani). In 2001 the Slovak Republic signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. All these documents accord Roma the right to use the Romani language in media, education, justice, state and public administration, economic and social life, and transfrontier cooperation.

However, in practice nobody was prepared for this situation, neither majority community, nor Roma, nor stylistically undifferentiated Romani with unsufficiently developed vocabulary, and uncodified. A stylistic and lexical insufficiency of the Romani language has manifested itself at attempts to use it, for instance, in newspapers, scientific articles, the guide to voting in the communal election, the census questionnaries, the leaflet warning against dangers of bird’s flu, etc. By analyzing these texts we try to show how the authors have coped with the absence of expert and administrative styles (the abundant use of descriptions) and with gaps in Romani lexicon. They have used, for instance, descriptions (hazdel o vast to vote); internationalisms (minoritno edukacija, determinacija); borrowings (frequently from Slovak: ustavos/ústav institute, sukromno vlastnictvo/súkromné vlastníctvo private property); and neologisms/occasionalisms, many formed on the Romani bases through analogical nomination – metonymy and metaphor: šer – šeralo a chairman; phal – phala a stage, by calquing of Slovak words: jekhetane buťi/spolupráca cooperation, and by derivation: dikhľariben theatrical performance, ľilangero postman. The analyzed texts also testify to an uncodified/unstandardized state of the Romani language in the Slovak Republic (several denominations for one concept used in a very short text by the same author: meribnaskro/murdaripnaskro/murdardo nasvaľipen a fatal disease, various orthography of one word: čiriklaňi/čiriklani chripka, y instead of i: 30 minuty, bare horučky, kachnale farmy, etc.). However, the texts also demonstrate the fact that though the above mentioned documents have not been fully introduced to the life they have presented an important impulse to use the Romani language on a larger-scale and in differentiated contexts and thus to contribute to its development and adaptation to the reality within the framework of its possibilities.

Alexander Rusakov

St. Petersburg State University (Russia)

The Soviet Standard Romani language of 1920’s – 1930’s: linguistic characteristics in a socio-cultural context

The creation of the standard language based on the North Russian Romani dialect (NRRD) in the mid-twenties was perhaps the most large-scale and at the same time the most unsuccessful of all attempts to codify the Romani language. In many respects this “standard language” resembles many other languages of the “smaller nations” of the Soviet Unions created in this period (a considerable part of these languages was banned – along with the “Romani language” – after the change of Stalin’s national policy in late thirties (see Kalinin & Rusakov, in print). Russification on all linguistic levels and sovietization in terms of the texts’ content and genre characteristics were substantial features of such idioms. On the other hand, among the creators of “Romani standard language” there were many people with profound knowledge of the genuine Romani dialects and folk-lore.

In this paper I analyze the texts of the “standard language” belonging to various genres and compare them with the analogical examples of other standardized idioms created in the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and with the folk-lore and other oral texts of the North Russian Roma, on the other hand. The traits pertaining to various linguistic levels are examined: morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatic organization of the texts. The main goal of the analysis is to study the impact of various types of social and cultural pressure on the realization of linguistic phenomena: interference, code-switching and code mixing, as well as on the development of intra-linguistic tendencies. A special emphasis is placed on the realizations of aspectual and voice oppositions in texts of various genres.

References

• Kalinin V. & Rusakov A. (in print). Die Literatur der Roma in der ehemaligen UdSSR, in den Ländern der GUS und des Baltikums.

Annemarie Sorescu Marinković

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade (Serbia)

The elaboration of a Bayash dictionary in Serbia: problems and possibilities

The Bayash are Roma ethnic groups speaking different dialects of the Romanian language and living on the territory of Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Bosnia, Bulgaria and, in a smaller number, in Macedonia, Greece, Ukraine and Slovakia. Even if, after leaving their original settlement, the Romanian language spoken by the Bayash has been influenced by the new linguistic surroundings, the Bayash dialects cannot be considered a language of its own, since they preserved the crucial features of the Romanian language, the most important changes occurring in the lexicon.

Until now, the most notable attempts to institutionalize the language of the Bayash have been made in Hungary, where two Bayash-Hungarian dictionaries have been printed so far. However, they are not scientific lexicographic documents, being dedicated mainly to the Bayash community and having educational purposes. In Croatia, the preparations for a Bayash dictionary were supposed to start in 2004. Both in Hungary and in Croatia systems for transcribing Bayash dialects were created, based on the orthographic rules of Hungarian, respectively Croatian.

The paper takes into discussion the possible elaboration of a scientific Bayash dictionary in Serbia and tries to offer some analytical perspectives. In the beginning, it points out to the specificity of this country as compared to other countries where the Bayash live, mainly to the fact that the Bayash from Serbia take on a Romanian identity, probably because Romania is not an abstract notion, being a neighboring country (this situation can only be compared to the one in Bulgaria, because the Bayash from Hungary probably did not have a Romanian identity on their original settlements either). The second part of the paper problematizes the scientific and technical elaboration of the dictionary. First of all, we must take into account the fact that the situation of Bayash in Serbia greatly differs from region to region: they speak two main dialects (Muntean and Ardelean), but there are many other local sub-dialects; furthermore, north of Danube, in Vojvodina, many of them live together with the Romanian minority and attend the Romanian school, while south of Danube there are no Romanian schools. Thus, the dictionary cannot be a general normative document, but, inevitably, a dialectal dictionary, being based upon one of the idioms. A possible solution is to have the dialectal lexeme translated in Serbian and in standard Romanian.

The paper also proposes the use of a Romanian-based phonetic transcription, this being justified by the fact that, like this, we can compare our results with those of other Romanian linguists who have studied these Romanian dialects.