Pia Laskar

Hristo Kyuchukov

Markus End

In October 2013, more than 100 scholars gathered at an international conference in Uppsala to discuss ways to identify and analyse a theme which in recent years has attracted growing attention: the discrimination, marginalisation and persecution of Romanies. The approaches adopted in this volume range from critical theory, semiotics, discourse and cultural analysis to intersectional perspectives. Many contributors here argue for a conceptual understanding of this phenomenon that goes beyond the notions of anti-Romani racism or Romaphobia, suggesting a shift in focus towards the prevailing prejudice in majority societies. The controversial core theme discussed in this book is the appropriateness and the theoretical understanding of the term 'antiziganism' and its analogue 'antigypsyism.' The essays explore empirical findings from the news media, film, literature and theatre, as well as contemporary and historical realities in Germany, Kosovo, Norway, the former Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Romania, Sweden, and the US. The striking historical and geographic continuity of stereotypes and the different modes of antiziganist practice comprise a central theme here, along with a focus on the counter-discourse of Romanies. Since comprehensive literature on this topic in Romani studies has, to date, been rare, this volume provides necessary readings for the debate among scholars, policy-makers and activists.

What’s in a Word?

Antiziganism

Yaron Matras

Peter Bakker

Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies), the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers, the distribution of inflectional, agglutinative, and analytic formation among syntactic categories, regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation, suppletion, aspects of syntactic convergence, and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals, with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology, Functional Sentence Perspective, Functional Grammar, functional-pragmatic typology, and general grammaticalization theory. Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language, and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties, to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey, to codified varieties in Macedonia, and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects, including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.

Hristo Kyuchukov

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