Vlax Romani language

Vlax Romani is a dialect group of the Romani language (Gipsy). Vlax Romani varieties are spoken mainly in Southeastern Europe by the Romani people.[3] Vlax Romani can also be referred to as an independent language[4] or as one dialect of the Romani language. Vlax Romani is the second most widely spoken dialect subgroup of the Romani language worldwide, after Balkan Romani.

Vlax Romani
řomani čhib
Native to	Bosnia, Romania, Serbia, Albania, Hungary, Israel; scattered in numerous other states
Native speakers	538,480 (2002–2014)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Central Zone Romani Vlax Romani
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Serbia
Language codes
ISO 639-3	rmy
Glottolog	vlax1238[2]

Name

The language's name is derived from the "Vlachs", a medieval exonym referring to the Romanians, as all the Vlax dialects share an extensive influence from Romanian on vocabulary, phonology and morphology.[5] There have been many waves of migration of Roma out of Romania, some of them being connected to the 19th century abolition of slavery in Romania.[5] This name was coined by British scholar Bernard Gilliat-Smith in his 1915 study on Bulgarian Roma, in which he first divided Roma dialects into Vlax and non-Vlax.[6]

The similarity of the words Romani and Romania is a coincidence, as they are not etymologically related. Vlachs are also a distinct ethnic group different from the “Vlax” classification of Roma.

Classification

Vlax Romani is classified in two groups: Vlax I, or Northern Vlax (including Kalderash and Lovari), and Vlax II, or Southern Vlax.[3]

Elšík[7] uses this classification and dialect examples (geographical information from Matras[8]):

Sub-group	Dialect	Place
Ukrainian Vlax	-	Ukraine
Northern Vlax	Cerhari	Hungary
	Hungarian Lovari
		Slovakia
	Austrian Lovari	Austria
	Polish Lovari	Poland
	Norwegian Lovari	Norway
	Serbian Kalderaš	Serbia
	Italian Kalderaš	Italy
	Russian Kalderaš	Russia
	Taikon Kalderaš	Sweden[9]
	American Vlax	USA
Southern Vlax	Vallachian	Romania
	Ihtiman	Bulgaria (named after the city)
	Gurbet	Serbia and Bosnia
	Korça	Albania (named after the city)
	Italian Xoraxane	Italy (Xoraxane translates as "Muslims" in the dialect)
	Ajia Varvara	Greece (named after a suburb of Athens)

Writing systems

Vlax Romani is written using the Romani orthography, predominantly using the Latin alphabet with several additional characters. In the area of the former Soviet Union, however, it can also be written in the Cyrillic script.[10]

References

1. Vlax Romani at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016)
2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Vlax Romani". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
3. Norbert Boretzky and Birgit Igla. Kommentierter Dialektatlas des Romani. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2004. Teil 1: Vergleich der Dialekte.
4. "Romani, Vlax".
5. Yaron Matras (2002). Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 7. ISBN 9781139433242.
6. Yaron Matras (2002). Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 219. ISBN 9781139433242.
7. Elšík, Viktor (1999). "Dialect variation in Romani personal pronouns" (PDF). p. 2. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
8. Matras, Yaron (2002). Romani: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-02330-0
9. Hansen, Björn; de Haan, Ferdinand (2009). Modals in the Languages of Europe. Walter de Gruyter: p. 307 ISBN 978-3-11-021920-3.
10. "Journey of Besieged Languages" (PDF). ilholocaustmuseum.org.

External links