Romani Writing

Romani Writing
Author: Paola Toninato
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317970845

The Roma (commonly known as "Gypsies") have largely been depicted in writings and in popular culture as an illiterate group. However, as Romani Writing shows, the Roma have a deep understanding of literacy and its implications, and use writing for a range of different purposes. While some Romani writers adopt an "oral" use of the written medium, which aims at opposing and deconstructing anti-Gypsy stereotypes, other Romani authors use writing for purposes of identity-building. Writing is for Romani activists and intellectuals a key factor in establishing a shared identity and introducing a common language that transcends linguistic and geographical boundaries between different Romani groups. Romani authors, acting in-between different cultures and communication systems, regard writing as an act of cultural mediation through which they are able to rewrite Gypsy images and negotiate their identity while retaining their ethnic specificity. Indeed, Romani Writing demonstrates how Romani authors have started to create self-images in which the Roma are no longer portrayed as "objects", but become "subjects" of written representation.

Romani Writing

Romani Writing
Author: Paola Toninato
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317970853

The Roma (commonly known as "Gypsies") have largely been depicted in writings and in popular culture as an illiterate group. However, as Romani Writing shows, the Roma have a deep understanding of literacy and its implications, and use writing for a range of different purposes. While some Romani writers adopt an "oral" use of the written medium, which aims at opposing and deconstructing anti-Gypsy stereotypes, other Romani authors use writing for purposes of identity-building. Writing is for Romani activists and intellectuals a key factor in establishing a shared identity and introducing a common language that transcends linguistic and geographical boundaries between different Romani groups. Romani authors, acting in-between different cultures and communication systems, regard writing as an act of cultural mediation through which they are able to rewrite Gypsy images and negotiate their identity while retaining their ethnic specificity. Indeed, Romani Writing demonstrates how Romani authors have started to create self-images in which the Roma are no longer portrayed as "objects", but become "subjects" of written representation.

What is the Romani Language?

What is the Romani Language?
Author: Peter Bakker
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2000
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9781902806068

This book deals with the Romani language. It does not teach the readers to speak the language. Rather, it deals with its origin, its current use and status, its beginning literature and films, and the way it is learned by children and much more. It shows that Romani is a language in its own right, with its own, unique grammatical system, dialects, and particular norms of language use. Pressure from the outside world has diminished the use of the language in some areas, but generally it is a thriving language, spoken by millions of people.

Learn Romani

Learn Romani
Author: Ronald Lee
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1902806441

Romani has many dialects and no standard written form. This course of language lessons is based on the Romani language as spoken by the Kalderash Roma in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The course is designed for lay people, and any grammatical and linguistic terms are explained in plain English.

Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World

Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World
Author: Lorely French
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-05-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501302795

The Roma are Europe's largest minority, and yet they remain one of the most misunderstood and underrepresented. Scholarship on the Roma in German-speaking countries has focused mostly on the portrayal of ?Zigeuner/Gypsies? in literature by non-Roma and on persecution during the Nazi period. Rarely have scholars examined the actual voices of Roma to glean their perspectives on their social interactions and customs. Without such studies the Roma appear passive in the face of their long and troubled history. With a basis in theories of intersectionality, subalternity, and cultural hybridity, Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World rectifies this image of passivity by analyzing autobiographies, folktales, and novels by Roma, thereby promoting a better understanding of the multifaceted and multifarious cultures alive today in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In documenting their voices, Roma writers unveil the large extent to which their personal lives, their social interactions with other Roma and non-Roma, and the images they project of their values and traditions are highly influenced by gender and ethnicity. Anthropological and historical studies have frequently portrayed Romani groups as displaying a patriarchal social structure with highly demarcated roles for men and women. In contrast, the significant parts that both men and women play in disseminating autobiographical, fictional, and historical narratives challenge this ubiquitous notion of largely patriarchal Romani cultures. The insights that both sexes provide on the relationship between gender and ethnicity in the context of cultural taboos, norms, and expectations unveil the complexities and diversities inherent in any minority group and its relationship to the dominant society.

Negotiating Linguistic Plurality

Negotiating Linguistic Plurality
Author: María Constanza Guzmán
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0228009561

Cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality are seen as markers of our time, linked to discourses about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the context of economic globalization in the late twentieth century. It is often monolingualism, however, that informs understanding and policies regulating the relationship between languages, nations, and communities. Grounded by the idea of language as lived experience, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes linguistic plurality to be a continuing human condition and offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective on it. The essays featured cover concepts and praxis in which linguistic plurality surfaces in the public sphere through institutional and individual practices. The collection adopts a critical view of language policies and foregrounds distances and dissonances between policy and language practices by presenting lived experiences of multilingualism. Translation, seen as constitutive to the relations inherent to linguistic plurality, is at the core of the volume. Contributors explore a range of social and institutional aspects of the relationship between translation and linguistic plurality, foregrounding less documented experiences and minoritized practices. Presenting knowledge that spans regions, languages, and territories, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality is a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes language plurality: what its limits are, as well as its possibilities.

Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity

Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity
Author: Thomas Alan Acton
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1997
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780900458767

Romany culture is perhaps the most Indo-European of all. The ancestors of the Gypsies left India around 1000 years ago and mixed with every culture on the way to produce a variety of Romany dialects and well-known cultural achievements from Hungarian Gypsy music to the English Gypsy caravan. Such images somehow co-exist, however, with continuous persecution.

Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities

Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities
Author: János Imre Heltai
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2023-06-19
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 3110769662

This multi-authored monograph, located in the intersection of translanguaging research and Romani studies, offers a state-of-the-art analysis of the ways in which translanguaging supports bilingual Roma students’ learning in monolingual school systems. Complete with a video repository of translanguaging classroom moments, this comprehensive study is based on long-term participatory ethnographic research and a pedagogical implementation project undertaken in Hungary and Slovakia by a group of primary teachers, bilingual Roma participants, and researchers. Co-written by academic and non-academic participants, the book is an essential reading for researchers, pre- and in-service teachers of Romani-speaking students, and experts working with collaborators (learners, informants, activists) whose home languages are excluded from mainstream education and school curricula. The videofiles in the book are available via the following website: http://www.kre.hu/romanitranslanguaging/index.php/video-repository/

Language Families in Contact

Language Families in Contact
Author: Anna-Maria Sonnemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2022-10-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311075617X

The book provides an encyclopaedic overview of the language contact between Slavic languages and Romani in Eastern, South-Eastern and East-Central Europe. It is based on Yaron Matras’ pragmatic-functional approach to language contact and follows a new direction in Romani linguistics that conceives Romani as a subgroup of closely related languages rather than a single language. The central topics discussed in the book are: Slavic impact on Romani phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax; forms and functions of Slavic verbal prefixes in Romani; Slavic impact on the Romani lexicon; Romani elements in the nonstandard lexicon of the Slavic languages; writing Romani with ‘Slavic’ alphabets.