Bibliography of Modern Romani Linguistics (review)

Romani, in origin an Indic language, is now spoken mostly in Europe. Due to the dispersal of its speakers over the millennia and their contacts with other languages, different dialects developed. Nonetheless, although mutual intelligibility breaks down among these dialects, linguists recognize them as constituting the same language.

Peter Bakker and Yaron Matras assert that interest in Romani has been rising in the last decade. This is evidenced by research in various aspects of the language; official recognition of it as a minority language in Sweden, Finland, and Macedonia; an increase in literary production; the inclusion of the language in news broadcasts in the electronic media; an increase in the number of monographs and other publications; and, finally, the inclusion of the language in academic programs (vii).

This bibliography lists 2,651 publications related to Romani and closely related languages such as Lo-mavren in Armenia and Domari in the Middle East, in addition to Para-Romani, languages that borrowed lexical items from Romani. Virtually all the publications in the bibliography were authored in the twentieth century, though it also includes works published in the first three years of the twenty-first century. There are items in more than thirty languages from Europe and Asia. Titles of works in English, French, German, and Spanish were left untranslated; titles written in other languages are given in the original as well as in an English translation. Titles written in orthographies that are not Latin-based, such as modified Arabic (for items written in Persian), Armenian, or Greek, were transliterated into Latin-based script.

The bibliography is arranged alphabetically by name of authors or editors, each with a number and full bibliographical citation. Keywords at the end of each entry indicate the contents of each item. The compilers also provide explanations of the keywords (xix–xxviii). In addition, there are four comprehensive indices that refer to the item numbers listed in the bibliography. B&M also provide a guide to Romani linguistics by selecting recent, representative, and accessible introductory studies that are categorized thematically. For example, one section includes works devoted to the description of dialects, another to dictionaries, a third to language contact and grammatical borrowing, and so on.

Some errors went unnoticed in the introduction, for example, ‘the latters case’ (x), ‘it approved unavoidable’ (xix), in addition to a dangling clause in lieu of a sentence (xiv, 1.4). The word nawar in Arabic is not uniformly used in all Arabic-speaking regions, as other terms are used, for example ghajar, zut, and kawli. There is still more work to be conducted on Romani in these regions.

Bibliographies by their nature are prone to becoming outdated from the date of publication as fresh scholarly materials emerge. As Romani is increasingly becoming a language of interest to linguists (as asserted by B&M), this bibliography is of valuable service to those interested in Romani linguistics and a welcome contribution to linguists in general.