Language contact: influence of Czech on Romani

This paper surveys the issue of the current contact between Czech and Romani, particularly the influence of Czech on Romani. The contact between the two languages has not lasted much longer than six decades, and so the Czech influence on Romani is not as heavy as it is in case of Hungarian and Slovak, the former contact languages of the variety we focus on, the North Central dialect of Romani. The paper is based on two recorded dialogues between the author and a native speaker of the dialect. The latter is a member of the second generation of Czech-born Roma, who has no or only limited contact with the previous contact language. The paper briefly summarizes the main sociolinguistic factors involved in the contact situation, both in a global and in a case-focused perspective. The core of the paper is an analysis of the boundary between fully adapted lexical borrowings on the one hand and (un-adapted) insertions of one- or multi-word Czech expressions into Romani on the other hand. Individual sections of the paper deal with topics such as gramatical words, discourse markers, institutional or cultural borrowings, tag switching, and multiple reasons for language alternation within a particular discourse