Evangelia Adamou

Bilingual speech and language ecology in Greek Thrace: Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish

This paper examines the influence of language ecology (Mufwene 2001, 2005) on bilingual speech. It is based on first hand data from two undocumented varieties of Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish in Greek Thrace, in both cases Turkish being an important language for the communitys identity. This analysis shows, on one hand, how the Romani-Turkish fused lect (Auer 1998) was produced by intensive and extensive bilingualism through colloquial contact with the trade language, Turkish. On the other hand, it shows how semi-sedentary Pomak speakers had limited, institutional contact with Turkish, resulting in more traditional codeswitching and emblematic lexical borrowings.

Unevenly Mixed Romani Languages

This study reports on language mixing in two Romani communities, with a century-long presence in Finland and in Greece respectively. A quantitative analysis of free-speech data shows that verbs from the contact languages, Finnish and Turkish, are systematically inserted into a dominant Romani speech with their respective Finnish and Turkish tense, mood, aspect, and person morphology. The insertion in language A of non-integrated single words from language B is atypical for classic code-switching and borrowing, but is a well-known mechanism in the creation of mixed languages. Unlike mixed languages, however, where no single dominant language can be identified, Romani is the main component in the corpora under study. We suggest that this type of Romani language mixing illustrates an early stage of mixed language formation that did not develop into an independent mixed language, owing to changes in the sociopolitical settings.

There are no language switching costs when codeswitching is frequent

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: There is ongoing discussion as to the cost of language switching, with some studies indicating high cost and others showing low or no cost. The main research question in this paper is whether there are language switching costs in communities in which codeswitching is frequent. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conducted two on-line experiments, that is, a picture choice with sentence auditory stimuli and a word recognition task in sentence context. We constructed 16 sentences with differing degrees of ecological validity (16 sentences × 4 versions = 64). The sentences included verbs with different language preferences in natural conversations (first language (L1), second language (L2) or both). Data and Analysis: Thirty-seven simultaneous L1-Romani L2-Turkish bilinguals participated in Experiment 1 and 49 in Experiment 2. To analyse the results, linear mixed models (lmer) were constructed using the ‘lme4’ package in R. Findings/Conclusions: In Experiment 1, participants responded significantly faster for the all-Turkish sentences, followed by the mixed Romani-Turkish sentences, and the two types of ecologically non-valid sentences. However, there were no processing costs for the mixed sentences when they contained Turkish verbs that are more frequently used in Turkish in the spontaneous conversations. In Experiment 2, reaction times were similar for Turkish verbs (with Turkish verb morphology) in a mixed Romani-Turkish or a unilingual Turkish sentence. Originality: Taken together, these findings indicate that language switching costs in comprehension depend on the frequency of codeswitching in the bilingual community, as well as on exposure to specific lexical items. Significance/Implications: The Romani-Turkish data support a usage-based approach to bilingual processing and confirm the need to conduct experimental research that takes into account the communicational habits of the participants.

Greek Thrace Xoraxane Romane

Romani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in several European countries as well as in the Americas, Asia and Australia, showing substantial dialectal variation. This illustration deals with Xoraxane Romane (Turkish Romani) spoken in Greek Thrace. Xoraxane Romane, which belongs to the Vlax branch of Romani, has been heavily influenced by contact with Turkish and also shows influences from Greek. As a result, Xoraxane Romane exhibits a mixed system that includes phonemes borrowed from both Turkish and Greek but without exhibiting complex phonological phenomena such as Turkish vowel harmony.

Replicating Spanish estar in Mexican Romani

Abstract Based on first-hand data, this paper shows how Mexican Romani-Spanish bilinguals have replicated several uses of the Spanish estar in Romani, using the nearly obsolete 3d person subject clitic pronouns. The Romani subject clitics (lo, la, le) have become associated with the Spanish copula estar ‘to be’ in affirmative present tense clauses, thus restricting the uses of the native Romani copula. Moreover, the subject clitics have replicated the uses of estar in locative predications and in constructions with participles. These findings contribute to the general discussion over the complexification or simplification of languages in contact settings. It is argued that although the replication of Spanish estar has rendered Romani more complex, the resulting convergence may be considered as an overall simplification for the bilingual speakers (Matras 2009).

Rena Torres Cacoullos & Catherine E. Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the community. Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240 p.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Review article of < Rena Torres Cacoullos & Catherine E. Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the community. Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240 p.> Evangelia Adamou

Beyond Language Shift: Spatial Cognition among the Ixcatecs in Mexico

Recently there has been a renewed interest surrounding the role that language plays in the shaping of cognition based on the study of spatial relations with a particular attention to Mesoamerican languages. Since Brown and Levinson (1993), several studies have shown that speakers of Mesoamerican languages largely prefer non-egocentric strategies in the solution of nonverbal tasks and that this preference strongly aligns to the spatial expressions found in these languages. Moreover, it has been argued that contact with Spanish increases the use of egocentric responses. This paper engages in this discussion with new evidence from a Mexican community which has shifted from a Mesoamerican language, Ixcatec, to Spanish during the twentieth century. It presents three studies consisting of nonverbal, memorization tasks, conducted with a total of 52 monolingual Spanish speakers from the community of Santa Maria Ixcatlan. According to the neo-Whorfian approach, the residents of Santa Maria Ixcatlan should strongly favour the Spanish-related egocentric responses. Against this assumption, however, our study shows that the geocentric responses are predominant among the Ixcatecs. This result clearly indicates that frames of reference are culturally-defined and do not disappear in case of language shift but persist in cognitive representations among the members of a stable, rural community.

Borrowing and Contact Intensity: A Corpus-Driven Approach From Four Slavic Minority Languages

Numerous studies on language contact document the use of content words and especially nouns in most contact settings, but the correlations are often based on qualitative or questionnaire-based research. The present study of borrowing is based on the analysis of free-speech corpora from four Slavic minority languages spoken in Austria, Germany, Greece, and Italy. The analysis of the data, totalling 34,000 word tokens, shows that speakers from Italy produced significantly more borrowings and noun borrowings than speakers from the other three countries. A Random Forests analysis identifies ‘language’ as the main predictor for the ratio of both borrowings and noun borrowings, indicating the existence of borrowing patterns that individual speakers conform to. Finally, we suggest that the patterns of borrowing that prevail in the communities under study relate to the intensity of contact in the past, and to the presence or absence of literary traditions for the minority languages.

A corpus-driven analysis of Romani in contact with Turkish and Greek

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.