New book published by the Institute for Balkan Studies: Gurbet Romani in contact

The monograph "Gurbet Romani in contact. Analysis of Balkanisms and Serbian loanwords" was published by the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA as part of its special editions, authored by Mirjana Mirić, PhD, research associate and Svetlana Ćirković, PhD, senior research associate.
The Romani language belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family.
It is spoken by at least 3.5 million people in the world, mostly in Europe. Being heterogeneous, the Romani language has numerous dialects and varieties, which differ from each other at different levels of linguistic structure. The permanent and intensive contact of Romani speakers with the speakers of the majority languages ​​of the countries where they lived resulted in numerous changes in the grammatical structure of the Romani language and the lexicon.
The focus of the monograph is on contact phenomena in the Gurbet variety of Romani spoken in eastern Serbia (in Knjaževac and Miničevo). The first study analyzes balkanisms - linguistic traits that have developed or been preserved in Romani under the influence of centuries of contact with Balkan languages ​​and varieties. The second study investigates loanwords from the modern Serbian language and how they were adapted to the Romani morphological system.
Balkanisms and loanwords are analyzed across two generations of speakers. They are illustrated with numerous examples from the materials of the Knjaževac Gurbet variety, collected by field research in the period from 2016 to 2018.