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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
This paper deals with the influence exerted by a host language (Greek) upon a minority language in Greece (Romany). It is based on oral data which I collected in 1973-4 in the suburb of Agia Varvara a few miles north-west of Athens where several hundred Gypsies have long resided. After describing the pertinent sociological factors which regulate the interaction of Greeks and Gypsies in this community, I shall discuss the linguistic evidence which is mainly drawn from convergent vocabulary and idiom but not exclusively; there are at least strong hints that some influence may also have been exerted by Greek on the phonological and the morphological level.
* I wish to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities which granted me a Senior Fellowship to carry out this project. I am also grateful to Prof. Elias Dimitras, formerly Director of the Greek National Centre of Social Research, and his assistant, Dr. Grigorios Gizelis, for much friendly advice and practical assistance.
1. Ilias Petropoulos has published a glossary of this terminology 
(Athens, 1968), unfortunately not available to me. This same author has also published a glossary of another even more exotic jargon, kaliardà (
, Athens, 1971), which he claims is used by Greek homosexuals: some of the entries cited with no indication of their origin are demonstrably borrowed from Romany, e.g. 
(Romany phuri ‘old woman’) or 
(Romany latšó ‘good’). A selection of rebetic songs, in Greek with English translations, is available in Rebetika: Songs from the Old Greek Underworld, ed. Katharine Butterworth and Sara Schneider (Athens, 1975); the same volume contains essays by Elias Petropoulos on the history of rebetika, by Markos Dragoumis on rebetic music, by Ted Petrides on rebetic dances, and by Sakis Papadimitriou on ‘rebetika and blues’.
2. Études sur les Tchingianés ou Bohémiens de l’Empire Ottoman (Constantinople, 1870), pp. 385-6 (hereafter, Paspati).
3. Paspati, p. 22.
4. The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, being the older form of British Romani preserved in the speech of the clan of Abram Wood (Oxford, 1926; reprinted 1968), pp. 151-2, 247 (hereafter, Sampson).
5. An article by Uhlik, R. in Godisnjak, X (Sarajevo, 1973)Google Scholar, and not available to me deals with the Balkanisms of Jugoslav Romany. As summarized by Kendrick, D. S. in the new journal Roma (sponsored by the Indian Institute of Romani Studies, Chandigarh, India, June, 1974–), I, a, p. 63 (January 1975)Google Scholar, these not unexpectedly include ‘anticipation, the ethical dative, analytic formation of the future and subjunctive replacing infinitive’.
6. See Sandfeld, Kr., Linguistique balkanique (Paris, 1930), pp. 180–4 (hereafter, Sandfeld)Google Scholar.
7. Popp Serboianu, C. J., Les Tsiganes: Histoire-Ethnographie-Linguistique-Dictionnaire (Paris, 1930) [hereafter, Serboianu])Google Scholar
8. Gjerdman, Olof and Ljungberg, Erik, The Language of the Swedish Coppersmith Gypsy Johan Dimitri Taikon (Copenhagen, 1963 thereinafter, Gjerdman-Ljungberg]).Google Scholar
9. See ‘Learn Romani’ by Lee, Ronald in Roma, I, 1, p. 61 (June, 1974).Google Scholar
10. See the entries papo and kako in Siegmund Wolf, A., Grosses Wörterbuch der Zigeunersprache (Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim, 1960 [hereafter, Wolf]).Google Scholar
11. E.g. the forms papo and kak occur in Serboianu.
12. Gjerdman-Ljungberg, p. 54.
13. On the other hand, the generalized form kako appears first as a vocative and then as a nominative in a Russian Romany text transcribed by Barannikov, A. P., The Ukrainian and South Russian Gypsy Dialects (Leningrad, 1934), p. 122.Google Scholar
14. Sampson, p. 204.
15. Wolf, s.v. kurko.
16. While it is obvious that a Greek word has been introduced, it is perhaps less obvious that the entire phrase is really a caique on the corresponding Greek model, 
just as 
is merely Gk. 
with a substitution of Rom. it for Gk. 
‘is’.
17. All are missing in the English word index to Gjerdman-Ljungberg. Wolf has no entry for ‘west’; he lists one term for ‘east’, clistipe, which is found only in Serboianu; he has only one entry for ‘north’, botnos, which occurs only in a listing by the nineteenth-century scholar, A. F. Pott; Wolf does list three terms for ‘south’, dilos from Hung, del, jigo from Czech jih, and inherited pasdiwes (‘half-day’ and consequently ‘noon’, ‘soudi’, but marked as rare in this meaning).
18. Sampson, p. 112.
19. Serboianu, p. 358.
20. Since most Gypsies could not write, they borrowed a variety of words to express diis concept. Wolf lists pisinav from Slavic, irinav from Hungarian, etc.
21. K’er means ‘house, residence’, but since this speaker’s experience is exclusively of one-room dwellings, it means ‘room’ in this context.
22. Khasarav occurs also in Rumanian Romany according to Serboianu, P-335.
23. A very few borrowed Greek verbs do not conform to this pattern, notably zalisavav ‘be dizzy’ from Gk. 
aorist stem of 
‘be dizzy’. Here the formant -avav is best taken as passive used to imitate the mediopassive of the Greek original.
24. Cf. inchalaváu and inchaláu in Serboianu, p. 328.
25. Romany O askeri may be directly borrowed from Turkish asker ‘soldier’. There is however a Greek derivative 
now meaning ‘troop, crowd’ which may have influenced the Romany word. In the nineteenth century, e.g. in the memoirs of Gen. Makriyannis, 
was in common use to mean ‘Turkish soldiers’.
26. Sandfeld, p. 7, lists many examples including Gk. 
‘he quarrels with his wife’.