Article published in:
Language Variation - European Perspectives V: Selected papers from the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), Trondheim, June 2013
Edited by Eivind Torgersen, Stian Hårstad, Brit Mæhlum and Unn Røyneland
[Studies in Language Variation 17] 2015
► pp. 1–16

A corpus-driven analysis of Romani in contact with Turkish and Greek

The speakers of Muslim communities living in Greek Thrace are typically trilingual in Romani, Turkish and Greek. In an earlier work (Adamou 2010) it is said that Thrace Romani is an example of a fused lect, defined as a form of stabilized code-switching (Auer 1998). The claim was that Turkish constituents were part of Romani’s grammar and that, unlike code-switching and language mixing, were not subject to variation. The present work contributes to this discussion through a corpus-driven analysis of Thrace Romani. The analysis of a 5,000 word conversational corpus establishes a quantification of the mixing of the three languages, per word class and per speaker, showing that in a majority of cases switching is insertional and that there is little inter-speaker variation.
Keywords: fused lect, Greek, Romani, trilingualism, Turkish, variation
Published online: 09 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.17.01ada
References

References

Adamou, Evangelia
2010 “Bilingual speech and language ecology in Greek Thrace: Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish.” Language in Society 39 (2): 147−171. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 “Verb morphologies in contact: evidence from the Balkan area.” In Morphologies in contact, eds. M. Vanhove, T. Stolz, H. Otsuka and A. Urdze, 143−162. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Adamou, Evangelia, and Kimmo Granqvist
, Prepublished March 27 2014 “Unevenly mixed Romani languages.” International Journal of Bilingualism. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Auer, Peter
1998 “From code-switching via language mixing to fused lects: toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 6: 1–28.Google Scholar
Backus, Ad, and HannekeVan der Hejden
2002 “Language mixing by young Turkish children.” Psychology of Language and Communication 6 (1): 55−73.Google Scholar
Friedman, Victor
2010 “Turkish grammar in Balkan Romani: Hierarchies of markedness in Balkan linguistics.” Balkanistica 23: 107−124.Google Scholar
Krauss, Michael
2006 “Classification and terminology for degrees of language endangerment.” In Language Diversity Endangered, ed. N. Brenzinger, 1−8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Matras, Yaron
2009 Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Muysken, Pieter
2000 Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-mixing. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol
1993a Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Code-switching. Oxford: Clarendon press.Google Scholar
1993b Social motivations for codeswitching. Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2013 “Paying attention to morpheme types: making borrowability more precise.” In In and out of Africa languages in question, ed. C. de Feral, 31−42. Peeters: Louvain.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana, and Nathalie Dion
2012 “Myths and facts about loanword development.” Language Variation and Change 24 (3): 279−315. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, and David Sankoff
1988 “Code-switching.” In Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 2, eds. U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, and K.J. Mattheier, 1174−1180. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar