The Typology and Dialectology of Romani

Book excerpt: Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies), the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers, the distribution of inflectional, agglutinative, and analytic formation among syntactic categories, regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation, suppletion, aspects of syntactic convergence, and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals, with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology, Functional Sentence Perspective, Functional Grammar, functional-pragmatic typology, and general grammaticalization theory. Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language, and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties, to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey, to codified varieties in Macedonia, and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects, including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.