Travellers and Their Language (review)

The term ‘Traveller’, as used in the title, refers to the Rom (Gypsies) of Ireland and Scotland. Five of the fifteen contributions that make up the volume were presented at a symposium held in 2000 in Belfast; two of them are followed by transcripts of the discussions that followed. Three additional papers were commissioned for this volume, and one additional contribution was submitted by a symposium participant. The second part of the book consists of six presentations by Travellers about the nature of their language and their attitudes toward its use. The volume is therefore an interesting account of Traveller language from an etic (scholarly view from the outside) as well as an emic view (inside view from its speakers). The most common name of the Traveller language is Cant; in Ireland it is also known among native speakers as Gammon, while scholars refer to it as Shelta.

A few comments on the academic papers. Alice Binchy discusses the concept of Shelta and the contexts of its use, and then contrasts it with English: today’s Shelta lexicon draws on its own resources, but its morphology has been largely borrowed from English (the child stole the money corresponds in Shelta to the gawlya beeged the greid). Binchy estimates the size of the vocabulary at no more than about five hundred words, with some of those used only by the elderly.

Sinéad ní Shuinéar deconstructs the casual treatment of Traveller language in the past (when it was commonly referred to as broken English) and calls for a reassessment of its structure and use by contemporary linguists and anthropologists. Mícheál Ó hAodha discusses some of the ways in which the Irish lexicon influenced Shelta and identifies methods of word disguise operating in it such as reversal (e.g. laicín for Irish cailín ‘girl’) and arbitrary prefixing (e.g. griúcra for Irish siúcra ‘sugar’).

Marian Browne offers examples to support her contention that the syntax of present-day Cant and that of Hiberno-English are identical and she asks whether one should assume that Travellers’ English and Hiberno-English have also converged.

Among the papers dealing with Travellers and their language outside Ireland is a methodologically oriented paper by Ricca Edmondson and Níall Ó Murchadha in which the authors describe collecting Cant data in Ireland, Scotland, and the United States.

What do the Travellers have to say? Their recorded presentations and subsequent discussions were quite candid. Because their comments, unlike the prepared papers, were spontaneous and not organized, they are difficult to summarize. The speakers questioned some of the statements made by the scholars, but several of their disagreements were due at least in part to the misunderstanding of the careful and qualified academic style. Underlying their comments, however, was an expression of ethnic pride and support for their native speech.