Loanwords in Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia 1 ...

distinction is actually shared in the community) remain to be investigated, it seems that
loanwords from Hungarian that are used across all generations and regularly employed
in Romani discourse are not considered to be loanwords. Though they are referred to as
“Hungarian words” in some contexts, in other contexts the speakers describe them as
“proper Romani words.” This appropriation strategy is likely to be linked to the
speakers’ tolerance for lexical borrowing.
There are few productive onomasiological processes within Selice Romani and the
language relies heavily on loanwords in creating new naming units, especially in nouns.
Unlike some Romani varieties that employ internal word-formation processes to create a
layer of secret vocabulary in certain semantic domains (cf. Matras 2002: 223), Selice
Romani does not seem to avoid loanwords in these domains. For example, while in
most Romani varieties the regular word for ‘policeman’ is a Romani-internal formation
that is not comprehensible to outsiders, it is a loanword from Hungarian in Selice
Romani: čendéri < csendőr ‘gendarm’. 25
6. Grammatical borrowing
Selice Romani has been affected by grammatical borrowing to a great extent. 26 Due to
space limitations I will only present a very brief summary here (see Elšík 2007+, for a
more detailed overview). Several types of grammatical borrowing are distinguished
below. First, Selice Romani has borrowed various kinds of contact language function
words, only some of which are represented in the LWT sample. Next, there are a
number of borrowed affixes in Selice Romani. (I distinguish between affix copying,
which is the direct transfer of contact language affixes without the mediation of lexical
borrowing, and affix extraction, which consists in importation of contact language
affixes within morphologically complex loanwords and their subsequent analogical
extension to bases that do not originate in the source language of the affixes.) Finally,
Selice Romani frequently replicates source language morphosyntactic patterns
25 To my knowledge only two related nouns, the masculine čačuno and feminine čačuni (derivations of
the indigenous adjective čáčo ‘true’), serve cryptolalic functions in Selice Romani: they may be used to
refer to any human referent in situations when the referent and/or by-standers are not supposed to
understand that the referent is being talked about.
26 Selice Romani, together with Guarani, shows the greatest extent of grammatical borrowing among the
25 languages included in a recent cross-linguistic survey (Matras & Sakel, 2007+), exhibiting some kind
of contact influence in 31 out of 36 prominent structural domains (Matras, 2007+).
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 29 of 65