Romani language

These Acrites respected one or two of us from our relationship to the bullies, as some of the fighting leaders of our boys were called, and when caught alone by Acrites coming home from school, we have been in terror of our lives till we heard some of them say in a language used by all sides, There goes the bully's sister.

This language was called hog Latin by the boys, but it is found in one of George Barrow's books as a specimen of the Romani or Gypsy language.

These fights were not confined to the boys on each side.

After mill hours, the men joined in the fray, and evenings that should have been better employed were spent in carrying on this senseless warfare.

With that being said, let's open our translators and learn about the languages of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The first language we're taking a look at is Romani.

So what is? Romani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Romani people.

Although it's not an official language anywhere in the world, it is recognized as a minority language in 18 countries, most of which are in Europe.

The sole non-European country that recognizes Romani is Colombia, and I have no idea why.

There is an estimated 4.6 million people that speak Romani, which is divided into four main dialects, Balkan, Carpathian, Northern, and Vlax.

There's also some groups that speak with a mixture of dialects, and there are some who mix local languages, creating a para-Romani variety.

Most dialects of Romani are classified as vulnerably endangered by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, with Baltic and Kalo-Finnish Romani being classified as definitely endangered.

What can you do for a living? You can beg.

And this is also unique to Romanes.

But there is a cultural component that allows for a certain, let's say, regulation and organization of labor as such.

And this becomes a very kind of point of dissonance for people who marry into Burmese families who are not Burmese.

Could you give us a flavour of some of the languages that you've been working with then?

Yes, in Europe we're working in languages like Icelandic, Maltese, Romani, Luxembourgish, Basque.

In Africa we have languages like Chichewa, the Tanzanian sign language, Walaf in Senegal.

So these are some of the examples that we have and we've been working with.

Even though the family had settled, the family all rocked.

They all spoke Romanes or Anglo-Romani.

As children, we would go over to see Great Aunt Lenda, who was in this big rickety house with her two daughters and their husbands and all the cousins, and the table would be full of food, and the older generation would fall to rockering.

And if I ever said to Dad, you know, "What's that language you speak?" And he'd say, "Take no notice.

The importance of this measurement is because of the relation of mental power to cranial capacity is close.

Cast of the interior of the skull, says Romanes, showed that all the earlier mammals had small brains with comparatively smooth or unconvoluted surfaces, and that as time went on, the mammalian brain gradually advanced in size and complexity.

Indeed, so small were the cerebral hemispheres of the primitive mammals that they did not overlap in cerebellum, while their smoothness have been such as in this respect to have resembled the brain of a bird or reptile.

This, of course, is just as it ought to be if the brain which the skull had to accommodate has been gradually evolved into larger and larger proportions in respect of its cerebral hemispheres or the upper masses of it which constitute the seat of intelligence.

Yaron was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester until 2020 and now holds visiting and honorary positions at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham in the UK, at the University of Haifa in Israel, and the University of Hamburg in Germany.

Yaron is an expert in contact linguistics and bilingualism, language documentation, Romani linguistics, Arabic dialectology, discourse pragmatics, language policy, urban multilingualism, and the linguistics of Kurdish, Hebrew, and Turkish.

He's probably best known for initiating the Multilingual Manchester Project and being the driving force behind LinguaSnap, the world's first app designed to crowdsource linguistic landscape data.

Today, we want to talk about Yaron's new book, Speech and the City, Multilingualism, Decoloniality, and the Civic University, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

And, um, and sort of there was a repeat of that when I then came to, to Europe to study, um, in, in Germany first, and, and, uh, I learned other languages through immersion.

I developed an interest in, in Turkish and Kurdish.

Um, and then I met, uh, Romani people when I moved to Hamburg for my MA and PhD and became probably the first or only person, a non-Romani person in Western Europe at the time to learn Romani fluently at the age of around twenty-five or so, which later became one of my main, uh, subjects of, of research, uh, interests.

And, and that was, you know, later on around the time of the political transition in Eastern Europe, and of course, uh, the whole world, the Romani world opened up, uh, to us, and that was a, a fascinating, um, time.