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

in numeral constructions; negation of phasal adverbs; ontological restrictions on relativizers;
certain pragmatic and syntactic aspects of linear constituent order; and more.
The above summary shows that Hungarian, the primary current contact language,
is by far the most important source of all types of grammatical borrowings in Selice
Romani. This is in line with the role of Hungarian as the most important source of
loanwords in Selice Romani. In contrast, Slovak and Czech, the secondary current
contact languages, appear not to have exerted any grammatical influence on Selice
Romani. Of the past contact languages of Selice Romani, Greek stands out as a major
source of grammatical borrowings, which contrasts with the relatively low proportion of
lexical Hellenisms. Recall, however, that the Greek loanwords that have been retained
in Selice Romani represent only a small fraction of all the Greek loanwords that are
reconstructable for Early Romani (see Section 3.5).
7. Conclusions
Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia, has been in contact with, and has
borrowed words from, a number of different languages in the course of its history.
Loanwords amount to almost two thirds of those lexicalized meanings that are sampled
in the LWT project. Loanwords of all major word classes and all semantic fields are
well represented in Selice Romani lexicon, although certain classes of function words
are not borrowable and although it seems that relatively more abstract semantic fields
are less affected by lexical borrowing. Nouns have a greater proportion of loanwords
than any other word class. Selice Romani makes use of established and productive
morphological mechanisms to integrate inflected loanwords, including nonce loanwords
from current contact languages. Instances of grammatical borrowing of both matter and
pattern are abundant. Hungarian, a language in which speakers of Selice Romani have
now been bilingual for many generations if not several centuries, is far and away the
most important source of loanwords and grammatical borrowings. In contrast, Slovak
and Czech, the other current contact languages of Selice Romani, contribute relatively
few loanwords and no grammar.
The general sociolinguistic situation of all Romani varieties is highly favourable
to contact-induced developments, since all adult Romani speakers are bilingual in the
relatively prestigious languages of the dominant populations and since, at the same time,
Romani linguistic ideologies are tolerant of linguistic borrowing, including borrowing of
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 31 of 65