Finnish Romani and other northern dialects of Romani in the Baltic ...

Finnish Romani and… An Introduction (1)• A four-year (Jan 1, 2013–Dec 31, 2016) project led by university lecturer,docent Kimmo Granqvist; co-funded by the University of Helsinki and theKone Foundation Language Program.• Linked to General Linguistics, studies of Indo-European, Balkan, Slavonic,Germanic and Baltic languages, and Fennistics.• The size of the Roma population in Poland, Russian Federation, the BalticCountries, Germany and Finland is at least 300,000.• Most Romani dialects spoken in the Baltic Sea area belong to northerndialects:• a meta-group divided into Northwestern (German and Polish Sinti and FinnishRomani) and Northeastern (most Romani dialects spoken in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia,Estonia and Russia) sub-branches.

Finnish Romani and… An Introduction (2)Figure 1. Romani dialects in the Baltic Sea Area.

Practical outputs• corpora: 121 new dialect samples (CSC), dialect samples added to theRMS database (the largest corpus of northern and other dialects);• six printed/online books: atlas of Northern dialects of Romani in theBaltic Sea area, descriptive grammar of Finnish Romani, textbook ofRomani language history, critical edition of 19th century manuscriptsof Finnish Romani, two PhD theses;• research papers and conference presentations, popular articles;• presentations at project events, and on the project website.

Subproject A (4)

Subproject B: Finnish Romani and othernorthern dialects (2014–2017)• The atlas of northern dialects of Romani in the Baltic Sea area willdescribe the most important:• a) phonetic and phonological (ca. 10 maps),• b) morphological and grammatical category-related (ca. 100 maps),• c) lexical and lexicophonological (ca. 40 maps)features that are relevant for the classification and comparison of northerndialects.• The atlas will furthermore discuss isoglosses of northern dialects andFinnish Romani, and the relationship of northern dialects andnorthern central dialects of Romani.

Sub-projects C and D: Descriptive grammar of FinnishRomani (2014–2017), history of Finnish Romani (2011–2016):• Sub-projects C and D will be based on analysis of grammatical categoriesand relationships from the point of view of morpho-syntactic typology.• The sub-projects will also deal with descriptive and historical phonology.• The sub-projects will take an attitude to Romani dialectology, contactlinguistics and the study of code-switching, borrowing and attrition.• Sub-project C will look at Finnish Romani from a synchronic point of view.• In sub-project D, the focus is on developments that have taken place inFinland within the light of preserved documents since the end of the 18thcentury.

National and international collaboration• The project is carried out at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrianand Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki.• The project is linked to General Linguistics, studies of Indo-European, Balkan,Slavonic, Germanic and Baltic languages, and Fennistics.• The PhD theses produced are co-supervised by Kimmo Granqvist and scholarsspecialized in research of interaction and grammar at different departmentsof the University of Helsinki.• The project furthermore co-operates with CSC in the online publication of thedata.• The project co-operates with academic scholars in Sweden, CzechRepublic, Russia and the UK.

Other and future plans• Currently there is a parallel project at UH on Romani Identity andAuthenticity, which will see collaboration of anthropologists andlinguists.• Another project, Microdialectology of Romani in the Baltics, isawaiting funding.

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