Ethnicity designating Romani loanwords in some European slangs: their origin, meaning and ideology

Abstract

The slangs of European languages contain words of Romani origin. In this paper I deal with presence of such words in colloquial Spanish and several Central European languages.

After a brief overview of the semantic groups where these words can be found I point out the group of ethnic terms. I explain the reasons why these words penetrated into the language and why their meaning could have changed.

The case study is based on my field research.

Keywords

• sociolinguistics
• slang
• loanwords from Romani
• Spain
• Central Europe
• language ideology