General considerations

‘Contact languages’ is a term normally reserved for languages that arose in situations of multilingualism and which can be said to lack a single ‘parent language’ in the sense of an ancestral language that is transmitted with no interruption across generations of speakers. The term is usually employed in connection with pidgins, creoles, and ‘mixed languages’ (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Bakker and Mous 1994, Thomason 1997, Sebba 1997). Although there is no direct attestation of the forerunner of Romani, the continuation of OIA/MIA inflection paradigms and core vocabulary rule out that the language arose in a way that is similar to the emergence of pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (but see discussion of Para-Romani varieties in chapter 10). Nonetheless, Romani is a language in contact. With the exception of very young children, there are no monolingual speakers of Romani. The preservation of the language outside India in the absence of a territory where Romani speakers constituted a majority population suggests that multilingualism has been the reality in Romani-speaking communities for many centuries, and most certainly since the Early Romani period. We might therefore designate Romani as a language that is ‘permanently in contact’.