Unevenly mixed Romani languages
Résumé
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.
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