Romanifolkets språk

The Tater language (Romani) is of Indo-Aryan origin, and thus ultimately cognate with Hindi. The speakers of this language, the Roma, left India more than 1000 years ago. When the Roma reached Europe, their language had meanwhile absorbed influences from several languages located between India and Europe. The Romani of Norway still contains many Indic words, but its grammar coincides mostly with Norwegian. For a long time till this day the Roma have been discriminated and persecuted, especially in the Thi rd Reich. The project pursues two separate objectives. The first: Setting-up of an Internet database that facilitates a better self-representation of the Norwegian Tater (Roma) community vis-à-vis the general public. The database will contain different types of oral texts, a selection of which will be translated into Norwegian. The second: A linguistic survey of the Tater language (Romani) that comprises three research goals: An investigation into the earliest stages of Proto-Romani; an analysis of arch aic morphological features of present-day Romani; a sociolinguistic study of Romani-Norwegian code switching. The research team will use an electronic tool for the annotations on the audio resources that enter the database. The results of the linguistic s urvey will be published in scientific journals.