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The mutual influence of Romani, Spanish and the other languages of the Iberian Peninsula

Publication

Abstract

The language contact of the inflectional Romani and Spanish, Catalan and other languages of the Ib. Peninsula began in the 15th century.

A long-term and immediate contact between Romani and a language of the majority in several places of Europe resulted in emergence of so called Para-Romani varieties. In the Iberian Peninsula several Para-Romani varieties emerged.

The process of their phonological, morphological and lexical evolution from the inflectional Iberian Romani is described in the first part of the thesis. The original form of the Iberian Romani of the 15th century was similar to Early Romani of the Byzantine period.

The influence of Spanish (and other languages of the Ib. Peninsula) is evident in language plans.

On the other hand, the Romani elements conserved in these varieties show archaic features and specific innovations and many of them can hardly be assigned to the language contact. My description of the Ib.

Para-Romani varieties is based on an extensive language material dated between the 17th and 21st century and it also draws attention to some language phenomena which till now have not been described in these varieties. The second part of the thesis deals with the complementary impact of the language contact: the Romani influence on Spanish.

This influence is much lower and it is limited only to the non-standard language. The Romani-derived terms started to appear in Spanish mainly in the 19th century and nowadays many of them are considered to be obsolete.

The knowledge of the selected words of Caló (Spanish Para-Romani) origin became the subject of our sociolinguistic questionnaire-based research carried out among almost 1500 respondents. I tried to identify possible tendencies regarding the knowledge of these words with relation to the age, sex, education and place of origin of the respondents.

One of the aims of my thesis was also to verify if the paper and electronic questionnaire-based surveys are suitable for this type of research.