Abstract
This paper presents a study conducted with 40 Roma children from Slovakia, aged between 4-8 years, who are speakers of an ethnolect learned from their parents, but which in Slovak society is not considered to be a “good Slovak language”. Diagnostic tests in the official Slovak language were administered to the children in order to determine how well they know the complex grammatical categories of official Slovak: wh-questions, wh-complements and passive verbs. One hypothesis raised by the study is that the Roma children follow the normal linguistic development path of other children and, by the age of 5, already know the deep structure of complex sentences in Slovak. The results show that although the Roma children grow up with a particular variety of the Slovak language that is an ethnolect, they are able to comprehend and produce deep linguistic structures of Slovak, which serves for them as a mother tongue.
Highlights
The paper presents a study done with 40 Roma children from Slovakia between 4-8 years old
In order to overcome these difficulties and to survive in an unfriendly environment, in some parts of the country, the Slovak Roma have developed their own strategy of language shift, namely, to learn Slovak and cease maintenance of their mother tongue, assuming this will help them to overcome the existing discrimination and exclusion in the Slovak society, their children will be better received in school and later more effectively integrated into the majority society
The children are learning a distinctive ethnolect of Slovak, it is obvious that they have acquired the deep structure of Slovak
Summary
The paper presents a study done with 40 Roma children from Slovakia between 4-8 years old. In order to overcome these difficulties and to survive in an unfriendly environment, in some parts of the country, the Slovak Roma have developed their own strategy of language shift, namely, to learn Slovak and cease maintenance of their mother tongue, assuming this will help them to overcome the existing discrimination and exclusion in the Slovak society, their children will be better received in school and later more effectively integrated into the majority society. A native Slovak speaker can readily recognize that this is not Slovak as spoken by Slovak people (Hübschmannova, 1979)
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