From Iberian Romani to Iberian Para-Romani varieties by Zuzana Krinková (review)

This book by Krinková is a valuable contribution to Romani studies. It is one of the few studies comparing different varieties of (Para)Romani from the Iberian peninsula, and it is the study that goes most into depth of all. It is a publication based on her dissertation, written under supervision of the Prague hispanist Udo Bužek, who likewise has contributed to the study of Spanish Romani with some significant studies. Krinková does not cover just Spanish Romani, but rather the whole state of Spain, and not just Castillian and southern Spanish varieties of Andalucia.

Spain is a country with several indigenous languages and cultures. In order to understand the context, some background information is necessary about the languages of the Iberian peninsula, which covers the countries of Spain and Portugal. As much of South America was settled from there, also by Gypsies from the Iberian peninsula, that continent is also relevant. Along the east coast, Catalan dominates. Catalan is a separate language from Spanish and French, perhaps comparable with the difference between Czech and Polish. Some five million people speak Catalan. The southernmost variety (Valencian) is sometimes seen as a separate language, closer to Catalan than to Castillian. In the northeast of the peninsula, Galician is spoken, a language that is very close to Portuguese. Portuguese is the main language of Portugal, and just like Spanish, Catalan and Galician, the languages all descend from Latin. In the south of Spain, Andalucian Spanish is spoken, a dialect with quite a few differences in pronunciation. Finally, in the Western Pyrenees, Basque is spoken by perhaps 700,000 people. Basque is as different from Spanish as Hungarian is from Czech. Whereas Hungarian has historical ties with other languages such as Finnish and some languages in Asia, Basque is not related to any other language, or at least it cannot be proven.

The situation in the Iberian peninsula with regard to Romani is that inflected Romani as spoken in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and many other parts of the world, is no longer spoken as such by the Gypsies who migrated across the Pyrenees to the peninsula from the fifteenth century. Such varieties are spoken in Spain, but only by some Vlach immigrant groups who have arrived more recently, perhaps in the last hundred years, in the peninsula. Earlier groups of Gypsies arrived in the 1500s or early 1600s, and they left significant linguistic traces. The original Romani language is extinct, and all Romani people who descend from this first wave of immigration to the Iberian peninsula have shifted to the local languages. But some Romani vocabulary has been maintained. Most Gypsies use at least a few dozen common words in their speech that are from Romani, and they identify as Gitanos, Gitans or Ijtoak ‘Gypsies’. Their language is usually known as Caló, from the Romani word for ‘black’. In the Basque Country they also use an ethnonym derived from Romanichal, also used in England.

Krinková’s study is mostly an archaeological discovery trip, in which she gathers all linguistic materials on Romani varieties from the peninsula, dating from the earliest source from the second half of the sixteenth century to recently, and tries to draw conclusions about the origin, ties and migrations of the Spanish, Basque and Catalan Gypsies. As in any archaeological study, she has to create a history based on fragmentary remnants of what has been documented of the language. These artefacts are from different regions and from different time periods.

Virtually all sources on the Romani language from the peninsula show mixed languages, in which Romani vocabulary is embedded in the grammatical systems of the local languages Basque, Catalan, and (mostly Andalucian) Spanish. Such types of variety are known from other parts of Europe as well, and are sometimes referred to collectively as Para-Romani varieties. The proportion of Romani vocabulary tends to diminish over time, so that a mixed language with predominantly Romani vocabulary may...