Research seminar: Kirill Kozhanov, Potsdam University

Abstract

Language is always in flux. Various factors—phonetic erosion, semantic shifts, language contact—shape the direction and speed of language change.

Romani, an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in Europe, offers a unique opportunity to study these factors. Following a long migration from the Indian subcontinent to Europe, Romani evolved in close contact with Byzantine Greek during the 11th–13th centuries. After several migration waves outside the Byzantine Empire in the 14th–15th centuries, Romani spread across multiple areas in Europe, leading to the development of distinct varieties. Today, Romani is spoken over a vast territory and is in contact with dozens of languages from at least three distinct language families.

In this talk, I will examine which linguistic features contribute to the variation observed in contemporary Romani varieties, and to what extent language contact plays a role.

I will begin with a case study of argument encoding in valency patterns across 120 Romani varieties, showing that this encoding largely replicates patterns found in their contact languages. In some cases, Romani dialects become more similar to their contact languages than to other Romani varieties.

I will then extend the analysis to a larger sample of linguistic features covering phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic phenomena. While some varieties are more innovative than others, considerable variation is also observed among specific features across Romani.

After establishing stable and unstable features, I will discuss how they correspond to general linguistic theories about differing rates of stability across features.

The seminar is held in English.

On Kirill Kozhanov