User:Jiayun Chen/Balkan Romani/Bibliography

Romani, like Albanian and Rumanian, lacks a fully developed perfective/imperfective opposition.8 In the Balkan dialects, however, there are two present tense paradigms, a long form with final -a and a short form without it. Table 1 gives the present tense paradigms of the verb meaning 'do'. The Balkans were the first linguistic area (sprachbund) to he identified as such. The concept was originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity. The fact that the sprachhund cannot be as neatly bounded as the traditional language family has led to some calls tor abandoning the concept, but it remains a useful heuristic referring to the results of historical and social processes of language contact. Recent conflations of areal linguistics and typology miss these processes, which are themselves grounded in speaker interaction. Issues of causation in the emergence of sprachbunds involve both language shift and language maintenance, influenced by various social factors playing roles. This review examines both the history and the current state of Balkan linguistics as a part of the study of language.

Romani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken throughout Europe, in the Americas, and in Australia. The migrants, who probably belonged to service-providing castes (Matras 2002), arrived from India during the period of the Byzantine Empire, around the 10th century. Romani was considerably influenced by Greek during this period. At the end of the Byzantine era, some groups mi- grated toward western and northern Europe and new contact languages were added.

The first dialectological classifications were carried out by Miklosic 1872- 1880, reconstructing migration routes through the analysis of loanwords. The Balkans Roma were divided into two major groups on the grounds of religion and mobility (see Paspati 1870). On this basis, Gilliat-Smith 1915 distinguished in Bulgaria between the nomadic Christian populations originating from Walla- chia, termed the Vlax, and the Muslim, settled groups, termed non-Vlax. This had considerable impact on Romani studies, but more recently a dialectal categ- orization based on linguistic features has become dominant, distinguishing for the Balkan area a Balkan Romani branch and a Vlax Romani branch, with the latter being geographically centered in today's Romania and including the migrants in various Europeans countries (Bakker & Matras 1997, Elsik 2000, Boretzky & Igla 2004).

The dialects currently spoken in Greece belong to the Balkan and Vlax Romani branches. The presence of Balkan Romani speakers is documented as early as the 11th century and has been continuous since then. Vlax groups arrived more recently, usually in the 1920s following the Lausanne Treaty. The data presented in this paper were collected during three fieldwork visits carried out between 2005 and 2007 in a small Muslim community of approximately 300 people, settled in the suburbs of the city of Komotini. Komotini, or Güm.

The Balkan Romani of Turkey, numbering 72,500, are Unengaged and Unreached. They are part of the Romany people cluster within the Eurasian Peoples affinity bloc. Globally, this group totals 1,642,000 in 12 countries. Their primary language is Balkan Romani. The primary religion practiced by the Balkan Romani is Sunni Islam, the largest branch of Islam. Sunni Muslims follow the teachings of the Qur'an and consider the first four caliphs to be the rightful successors of Muhammad.

Total users in all countries: 811,800 (as L1: 611,800; as L2: 200,000). Serbia: 101,000 (2013 UNSD). 100,000 Arlija, 20,000 Dzambazi. Bulgaria: 281,000 (2011 census). 100,000 Arlija, 20,000 Dzambazi, 10,000 Tinsmiths, 10,000 East Bulgarian. L2 users: 200,000 in Bulgaria (Gunnemark and Kenrick 1985). Greece: 40,000 (1996 B. Igla). 10,000 Arlija, 30,000 Greek Romani. Macedonia: 38,500 (2002 census). Ethnic population: 53,900 (2002 census). Moldova: 12,000 (Johnstone 1993). Turkey: 66,000 (2014 J. Leclerc). Zargari (or Romāno, as it is called by its speakers) is the only genuine Indo-Aryan language still spoken in Iran. The purpose of this article, which is mainly based on the author's field work, is (a) to provide a brief, but at the same time precise, description of the main characteristics of Zargari phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, and (b) to examine the influences of Āzari Turkish and Persian on Zar-gari, which in some cases distinguish it from other Indo-Aryan languages, such as a tendency towards deaspiration, the existence of the phonemes /ö/ and /ü/, vowel harmony and the syllabic structure CV(CC).