Language Families in Contact: The Mutual Impact of Slavic and Romani

The book contributes to the current discussion in contact linguistics from a new perspective. It covers different outcomes of the language contact between Slavic languages and Romani in Eastern Europe, South Eastern Europe and East Central Europe. Based on the current research on language contact, grammaticalization and areal typology, the central topics discussed in the book are:

- Slavic impact on Romani phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax;

- Forms and functions of Slavic verbal prefixes in Romani;

- Slavic impact on the Romani lexicon (with a case study on Poland);

- Romani elements in the nonstandard lexicon of the Slavic languages;

- Writing Romani with 'Slavic' alphabets.

The novelty of the book is twofold: Firstly, it is the only publication examining two entire language families in contact, following a new approach in Romani linguistics that conceives Romani as a subgroup of closely related languages rather than a single language. Secondly, it is unique in its comprehensiveness and the encyclopaedic overview it provides, which goes beyond the existing case studies and is a new format in contact theory.