General and Applied Romani Linguistics: Proceedings from the 6th Inter

This is the fourth volume to come out of this series of conferences, and it reflects some of the older trends as well as new directions in the field of Romani Studies. The volume is organized into five sections: (1) dialectology; (2) studies on individual Romani dialects; (3) language change with and without contact; (4) computational linguistics; and (5) sociolinguistics. The collection opens with “The classification of Romani dialects: A geo-graphic–historical perspective ” by Y. Matras. The question of classifying dialects is central to the field of Romani linguistics. Challenging the more traditional “genetic ” approach to Romani dialect classification, the author justifies the use of the “geographical diffusion model ” in discussing the relationships between dialects. This is all the more significant since Romani is generally considered to be a non-territorial language. Essential to the new model is the idea that membership in a dialect group is not absolute, but rather relative to the specific linguistic features, with the whole network of dialects forming dialect continua. Thus, the article provides a new solid theoretical framework for researchin