ANGLO-ROMANI

Danny Noonan, Rita Marable & Zac Fulton (see handout “Fulton.pdf”)

Account of Settler Groups

  Romani is an Indic language associated with a group of traveling people who left Northern India sometime between the 6th-11th century and spread to many parts of the world.

  They arrived in Europe around the 16th century

  When the travelers arrived in Europe they referred to themselves as Rom, Romany or Romani

  Thinking they were from Egypt, Europeans called them Gypsy

Current Number of Speakers

  190,000-250,000 speakers worldwide

  About 90,000 speakers are in England, Scotland, Wales and South Africa

  About 5,000 speakers are in Australia,

  Another 100,000 speakers in United States.

  Angloromani is the in-group language of a marginalized minority.

  Used as a secret code when speakers do not want to be understood by outsiders, to identify each other in public, or at Romani gatherings to show and strengthen community unity

  Not used in the home, or with children until adolescence

  Acquired by adolescents after English competence already developed

When Did it Start?

  Dating the language is difficult since the Romanichals were not interested in writing their language down.

  Many of their speakers have a very protective attitude about revealing details of their speech to outsiders or about admitting that such dialects even exist

  If the dialects became too well known, their function would be lost

We Do Know

  Gypsies have been in Britain since 1505

  The first written reference to Anglo-Romani was in 1547

  A recently discovered manuscript from 1616 shows a word list and the replacement of the original Romani grammatical system with English

Origins of Anglo-Romani

  A conscious creation by English speaking vagrants and Romani-speaking Romanichals?

  A gradual disappearance of the original Indic inflection with replacement of English system?

  A result of young people no longer having access to full system of the language and inserting words from older generations of their family?

Sociolinguistic Variation

  In Britain it is called posh'n'posh (literally 'half and half') or pogadi jib 'broken language‘

  In the US speakers commonly call it Romnis.

  There are about two to three thousand documented Anglo-Romani words, but the average middle aged Romanichal has a vocabulary of about 300 - 800

  People in the community who have larger vocabularies are admired

  Speakers who are regarded by others as more competent or fluent will tend to downplay it because of other individuals who are even better speakers

  Full language competence is generally something that is attributable to others

  Speakers have a permanent self-image of only having a semi competence of the language

  Community members see the language as an incomplete, remote, almost lost language that they have only partial access to

  Linguistic competence is associated with past generations without reference to a specific point in time.

  Speakers of Angloromani are aware of the use of distinct special vocabularies by other "Traveling" groups, notably Irish and Scottish Travelers

  This has lead to a generic use of the term Romani to indicate the in-group speech any Traveling populations

A Joke

  Two Romanichals were adrift in mid-ocean on a raft, after their ship went down. The first lifted his arms to the heavens and cried "Oh Lord, if you get me out of this, I'll give you both my trailers, two piles of copper pipe and a whole set of Crown Derby." The second, hearing this, then raised his own arms and said "Lord, if you save me, I'll give you six trailers, ten piles of scrap, and seven sets of Crown Derby!" The first looked at him and said "Hang on, you haven't got six trai- ", but the second cut in quickly and hissed "Kecker! Mandy's jeein' the gaira!"

  Only the punch line is in Anglo-Romani and means 'Shut up! I'm kidding him along!‘

  The Romanichal think that even God doesn’t understand the language.

Classification of the Contact Language

  Anglo-Romani is an intertwined or mixed language created from English and Romani

  Peter Bakker describes it as a language that “roughly combines a colloquial English structure with a Romani lexicon” (Bakker 2000)

  Most of the Romani words used in Anglo-Romani are of Indian origin. Others are from Greek, Persian, and Armenian. In addition to that there are a few words from other European languages and other Traveler languages.

Phonology

  The same as British English

  The voiceless uvular fricative /x/ still exists in some dialects but often becomes the voiceless velar stop /k/ or the voiceless glottal fricative /h/.

  No distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated stops

Morphology

  Use of English inflectional morphology

  Loss of gender and case distinctions in pronouns

  English comparative and superlative forms

Sample Texts

Listening Sample

  Or if I was in a place with me dad years ago, and he’d say to me/ before we went in this place he’d say to me: må rokker, let mandi rokker, til ya chib. And I could never say nothing until I went outside. Let mandi rokker. And he used to say: mo/ muk’ us jå, you know.

Angloromani Romani Translation må ma ‘do not’ rokker (v) raker- ‘to speak’ mandi mande ‘me’ til - thil-/ther ‘to hold’ chib čhib ‘language/

tongue’ muk mukh- ‘to let’ jå dža- ‘to go’

References

  Bakker, P. 2000. The genesis of Angloromani. In: Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle. Commitment in Romani Studies, edited by Acton, T. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. 14-31. Retrieved January 25, 2010, from http://www. books.google.com

  Görlach, M. 1997. Varieties of English world-wide: where we stand. In: Links & Letters. 13-36. Retrieved January 27, 2010, from http://www.books.google.com

  Hancock, I. F. 1984. Romani and Angloromani. In: Languages in the British Isles, edited by Trudgill, P. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. 367-383. Retrieved January 25, 2010, from

http://www.books.google.com

  Hancock, Ian. "The Cryptolectal Speech of the American Roads: Traveler Cant and American Angloromani." American Speech. 61. 3 (1986): 206-220.

  Matras, Yaron. (n.d.) Manchester Romani Project. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/Research/Projects/romani/files/21_angloromanisample.shtml

  Matras, Y., H. Gardner, C. Jones, and V. Schulman. "Angloromani: A Different Kind of Language? " ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS. 49. 2 (2007): 142-184.