Romani (Xoraxane, Southern Vlax, Greece)
Glottocode : vlax1238 ISO 639-3 : rmy
Romani in Europe
The European Commission estimates that 6 million Roma reside in the European Union.[1] Although there are no actualized official numbers, it is estimated that more than half of the Roma population speaks Romani, an Indo-European language of the Indic branch. The situation varies greatly as Romani is spoken by the majority of Roma in several Central European and Balkan countries, but has long been abandoned in favor of majority languages in the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal where revitalization efforts are ongoing. Yet in other settings, the process of language shift is currently taking place as, for example, among Muslim Roma living in Greek Thrace (Adamou 2010). A common denominator is that Romani is a minority language in all these settings and that Roma typically use the language(s) of the majority population.
Official recognition of Romani as a minority language has been rare in the past, with the earliest and most noteworthy efforts in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1936. Over the last forty years, however, this situation has changed and numerous European states, transnational institutions like the Council of Europe, foundations, and associations, whether local or transnational, became engaged into the language policy and planning of Romani.
The mixed Romani-Turkish (Xoraxane Romani) variety spoken in Greece
The recordings available on Pangloss come from Xoraxane Romane (Turkish Romani) spoken in Greek Thrace (see map). Xoraxane Romane, which belongs to the Vlax branch of Romani, has been heavily influenced by contact with Turkish since the Ottoman times and also shows influences from Greek. As a result, Xoraxane Romane exhibits a mixed system, as can be seen in both the lexicon and grammar (Adamou 2010). It is not possible to talk of simple borrowings from Turkish, as this implies full integration into the Romani system of phonology and morphology. Although such integration does apply to nouns as far as morphology is concerned, it is not the case for verbs which transparently retain Turkish morphology when used in Xoraxane Romane (see Adamou and Shen 2019 for more insights).
Map of Thrace, Greece. The recordings were made in neighbourhood of the town of Komotini.
Adamou (2010) suggests that these mixed Romani-Turkish varieties developed among the trading groups as their professional activities required frequent contact with outsiders, which most likely took place in Turkish, the language of communication during the Ottoman rule (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries). It is plausible that the language shifting process of Muslim Roma to Turkish may have been disrupted with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. This major political change affected the status of Turkish as a trade language and, throughout the Balkans, only the Muslim groups maintained the intense contact with Turkish that was common in Ottoman times. In particular, when Thrace became part of the Greek State in the 1920s, the Muslim populations that were present in this area were exempted from the mandatory population exchanges between Muslims and Christians residing in the newly founded states, Greece and Turkey respectively. In addition, thanks to the Lausanne Treaty, in 1923, Muslims in Greek Thrace were granted the status of minority and a set of rights were guaranteed. Linguistic rights, in particular, granted the right to Muslims living in Greek Thrace to have access to bilingual education in Greek and in Turkish.
At present, the mixed Romani-Turkish variety remains for some families the home language and the language of in-group communication. For others, Romani-Turkish may be in use in the (extended) family, with community members, as well as with members of other Muslim Romani communities in the area. For example, intermarriages are frequent between members of the community of Komotini and those who live in the outskirts of the nearby town of Xanthi.
Bibliography
Adamou, E. (2010). Bilingual speech and language ecology in Greek Thrace: Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish. Language in Society, 39(2), 147-171.
Adamou, E. (2012). Verb morphologies in contact: evidence from the Balkan area. In M. Vanhove, T. Stolz, A. Urdze, and H. Otsuka, Morphologies in contact (pp. 143–162). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Adamou, E. (2016). A corpus-driven approach to language contact: Endangered languages in a comparative perspective. Boston and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Adamou, E., and Arvaniti, A. (2014). Greek Thrace Xoraxane Romane (Illustrations of the IPA). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 44(2), 223–231.
Adamou, E., and Granqvist, K. (2015). Unevenly mixed Romani languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19, 525–547.
Adamou, E., and Shen, X. R. (2019). There are no language switching costs when codeswitching is frequent. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23, 53–70.
https://doi.org/10.24397/pangloss-0000292