Yaron Matras

The University of Manchester · Linguistics and English Language

Drawing on an evaluation of statistics on language provisions and self-declared language practice, and on longitudinal ethnographic observations, we examine the role of the Polish language in shaping single transactions and durable social bonds and in demarcating interaction spaces among Polish immigrants in a UK metropolitan area. Language choice...

Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, we discuss teachers’ narratives about the language and identity of Roma pupils and compare them with those of the pupils themselves. We explore the sources of information that shape teachers’ dispositions, category conflation (of Roma with ‘Gypsies/Travellers’) and lack of infor...

The paper applies the notion of segmented assimilation to an inter-generational divide within a community of Roma migrants from Romania who settled in Manchester, UK. Drawing on long-term observations, we show how a successful trajectory of upward social mobility comes to a stall as the interplay between Roma-specific demographics (large families a...

Drawing on the example of Multilingual Manchester, we show how a university research unit can support work toward a more inclusive society by raising awareness of language diversity and thereby helping to facilitate access to services, raise confidence among disadvantaged groups, sensitise young people to the challenges of diversity, and remove bar...

The Kangjlari of Ţǎndǎrei in southeastern Romania offer an interesting case study of the consolidation within just a few generations of a new Romani community, as a result of state-sponsored relocation and settlement between 1950 and 1980. We discuss the linguistic implications of the formation of this new community, drawing on language material fr...

Service providers in Western welfare states have to engage with an increasingly differentiated citizenry. The arrival of new migrant communities triggers debates, negotiations and struggles over the needs of these communities and how service providers can engage with them. In this paper, we look at these processes of developing local social inclusi...

Recording the home languages of schoolchildren has long been acknowledged as a useful way of mapping community multilingualism. However, the need to process large quantities of data on many different languages has meant that in order to assess the vitality of community languages, researchers have had to rely on schoolchildren's self-reported langua...

The book offers a critique of current political and academic discourse on Roma, and calls for a “de-politicisation” of Romani ethnicity. While the critique of various disciplines’ approaches to Roma is pertinent, the book fails to acknowledge the solid linguistic evidence for the Indian origin of the Roma.

Manchester (England), one of the first industrial cities, is now home to over 150 languages. Ethnic minority and migrant communities take active steps to maintain heritage languages in commerce and through education. The paper introduces a model for a holistic approach to profiling urban multilingualism that relies on triangulating a variety of qua...

Romani is a fascinating test case for the role that language plays in the process of identity consolidation in a transnational context. Standardisation is no longer inherently connected to the ‘territorialisation’ of language. Instead, we witness a bottom-up process in which individuals take ownership of language and negotiate language practices. S...

: This is the first attempt to map specifically the Romani dialects of Romania – the country with the largest Romani-speaking population. The data under consideration derives from fieldwork carried out over the past decade as part of the dialectological documentation of the Manchester Romani Project, based on the Romani Dialectological Questionnai...

Romani is one of Britain's oldest and most established minority languages. Brought to the country by Romani immigrants from continental Europe in the sixteenth century or even earlier, it was spoken in its old, inflected form as a family and community language until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it yielded to English. But even aft...

A Definition of ContactConvergenceConvergence and Typological ChangeTypology and Generalizations on Contact-Induced ChangeConclusion References

Most societies in today's world are multilingual. ‘Language contact’ occurs when speakers of different languages interact and their languages influence each other. This book is an introduction to the subject, covering individual and societal multilingualism, the acquisition of two or more languages from birth, second language acquisition in adultho...

An examination of Romani and Domari, two Indo-Aryan languages spoken outside of India, shows that borrowing has an impact on a wide range of grammatical domains and categories. This includes even the domain of bound, inflectional morphology, often thought of as relatively immune to contact influence. Nonetheless, borrowing is not random, but tends...

The replication of concrete formal-structural material (morpho-phonological forms with attached meanings) from one language in another is universally understood to instantiate grammatical and lexical 'borrowing' (we follow mainstream usage here and attach no value judgement to the word 'borrowing' itself, which is obviously just a metaphor). More c...

Angloromani is the mixed Romani-English speech of Gypsies in Britain. Ours is the first modern attempt at a corpus-based, fieldwork investi- gation of Angloromani. Its emergence and functions, as well as its position within the typology of mixed languages, have been controversial. We consider the history of Angloromani and its present structures an...

The past decade has seen the emergence of linguistic pluralism in the use of Romani in insti-tutions such as media and education: language codification is primarily regional, targeting a regional audience. Regional initiatives are autonomous and implement their own solutions. At the same time, an international network of Romani language codificatio...

- scription is also intended to serve as a programmatic contribution to the agenda of Romani linguistics: it introduces the RMS project's methodology, and demonstrates how an integrated dialectological-typological approach can provide a concise yet comprehensive outline of a Romani dialect.

This paper argues for a cognitive motivation behind the nonseparation of the systems of discourse marking available to bilinguals. It produces evidence that bilingual speakers, in an unconscious effort to reduce the mental effort which is necessary to monitor and direct the hearer's responses and reactions to the speaker's utterances, can simplify...

Back to motivations: between discourse and grammar - Volume 3 Issue 2 - Yaron Matras

It has been suggested that the structural composition of mixed languages and the linguistic processes through which they emerge are to some extent predictable, and that they therefore constitute a language “type” (e.g. Bakker and Mous, 1994b; Bakker and Muysken, 1995). This view is challenged here. Instead, it is argued that the compartmentalisatio...

This article examines recent patterns of Romani westward migrations, challenging the notion of a ‘tidal wave’ of Roma migrants entering western Europe. The first part distinguishes migration from nomadism, rejecting the common proposition that Roma are inherently nomadic, and goes on to distinguish the particularities of Romani migrations compared...

Holzinger (1993) has recently defined subject clitics in Sinti as markers of high reference continuity. Structural aspects of subject clitic distribution in Sinti lead me to a new interpretation of the functions of this referential device, especially as regards its role in the typology of the dialect. I argue that clitics are employed primarily in...

Studies of indexical devices differ in their analysis of ‘textual’ deixis, some advocating an overlap of deictic and anaphoric functions, while others argue in favor of a consistent form-function correlation. This ‘grey area’ of deixis is conventionalized in Romani, which has a complex four-term opposition system of demonstratives and place adverbs...

Members of a functional category that I tentatively call "utterance modifiers" are the most vulnerable items to contact-related linguistic change in grammar. Utterance modifiers regulate linguistic-mental processing activities that can be attributed to a "grammar of directing." Bilinguals, when faced with the tension of choosing among the systems a...

The prevailing approach to dialect classification in contemporary Romani linguistics is one that places 'branches' and the branching metaphor in the centre of the analysis. In- dividual dialects are regarded by most authors as belonging to one of several branches, which in historical perspective implies that they are offshoots of a proto-variety. A...