From Romani to Iberian Para-Romani varieties by Zuzana Krinková (review)

Abstract

From to Iberian Para-Romani varieties. Zuzana Krinkova. Prague: Karolinum. 2015. pp. 271. ISBN 978-80-246-2936-9, ISSN 978-80-246-2936-0 (pdf).Reviewed by Kimmo GranqvistPara-Romani varieties - the term is usually attributed to Cortiade (1991) - are mixed-language varieties whose lexicon is based on Romani, but which use the morpho-syntactic frame of surrounding (majority) languages. Zuzana Krinkova's monograph on the Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Brazilian (Para-) varieties offers a new contribution to the line of research on such language forms. The Iberian Para-Romani varieties, in particular Spanish Calo, have been been the subject of recent research by Adiego Ignasi-Xavier (e.g. 1998, 2002, 2012, 2013). Matras's (2010) book discusses British Angloromani, while Carling, Lindell and Ambrazaitis (2014) discuss Swedish Scandoromani. At the University of Helsinki, a PhD thesis is currently being prepared on contact varieties of and Finnish.Krinkova's book is divided into four main chapters, of which the first is a general introduction to and Para-Romani varieties (pp. 13-25). The two subsequent chapters discuss the history, classification and status (pp. 27-40) and sources (pp. 41-53) of Iberian Romani. The linguistic description of Iberian Para-Romani varieties itself constitutes a single lengthy chapter (pp. 55-172), comprising phonological and morpho-syntactic analyses and describing the vocabulary. These main chapters are followed by a conclusion, references, an abstract, an index and an etymological appendix. The sociolinguistic discussion (pp. 38-40) could have been more elaborate. It also fails to pay attention to the sociolinguistic situation of Brazilian Para-RomaniIn my view, one of the biggest problems of this book is the data focus on a time span of several centuries and the reliance on many different kinds of sources which are incoherent in many ways in regard to their quality, accuracy, comprehensiveness and overall scope. This problem is typical of most surveys that are based on historical text corpora. The book is based exclusively on written sources. In the case of Calo (pp. 44-52) these are mainly glossaries and dictionaries, and to a lesser extent text corpora and previous grammatical descriptions, the oldest dating back to 1573 and the newest from the twentyfirst century. Much less data is available for the other Iberian (Para-)Romani varieties which Krinkova discusses. It is a pity that the author did not carry out her own fieldwork to collect additional data on contemporary Iberian ParaKimmo varieties (though she flags this as a future task). Fieldwork would be particularly interesting when it comes to the Basque and Catalan Para-Romani varieties, which are extinct, but for which remnants can still found (p. 40).The phonological analysis (pp. 56-107) is extensive, detailed and fairly comprehensive. It begins with a look at the different orthographies of Iberian (Para-)Romani varieties. Orthographic practices are particularly intriguing in the case of uncodified languages such as most dialects, and when dealing with data from different periods of time. The analysis covers most areas of segmental phonology (vowel and consonant systems; phonotactics; phonological processes of adding or deleting segments, some sound changes). Much emphasis is placed on the one hand on conservative Romani-specific features such as aspiration of voiceless stops and the rhotics /r/ and /r/, the representation of the Early cluster /ndr/, as well as on some innovations that are shared with other modern dialects, such as palatalization phenomena. Attention is also given to changes induced by contact with the respective languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Krinkova's claim that nasalization does not exist in Romani (p. 94) is in not entirely accurate, as underlying geminate voiced stops are regularly substitutes for sequences of a homorganic nasal and a voiced stops in Finnish Romani, e. …