The Romani dialect of Parakalamos

Descriptions of the Romani dialects of Greece have hitherto concentrated on the Vlax varieties, spoken mainly by immigrants who were expelled from Turkey in the early 920s (cf. Igla 996, Messing 987). Hardly any discussion has been devoted to the Balkan dialects spoken by Romani populations with a long history of set-tlement in Greece. The paper describes the dialect of the Romacel community of Parakalamos, in the Epirus district of Greece—a language referred to by its speakers as Romacilikanes. The corpus consists largely of questionnaire elicitation carried out in Epirus as part of the Romani Morphosyntax (RMS) database project. The de-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