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
Published online: 9 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.17.01ada
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.17.01ada
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
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