the typological study of Zargari by Windfuhr, based on data collected with the assistance of Stilo, who recognized the dialect as Romani). Romani in Europe, and to some extent in Anatolia, has increasingly been the subject of systematic linguistic research during the last quarter century, in particular with regard to the dynamics of language contact, interference, and linguistic typology (cf.

The final stage of this process is the loss of the inherited grammar, while retaining a significant part of the hybrid lexicon, a type called Para-Romani in studies of European Romani. This includes major restructurings in morphology and syntax. Texts also survive from this period with snippets of sīn prose and poetry.The languages and dialects popularly called “Gypsy” ( lāḵ “maternal aunt,δ sib > lib “apple,” amu > lāmu “paternal uncle,”), and combinations thereof and other concealing means.Īll Gypsy languages are typologically hybrids, and reflect the results of contact with successive host languages through centuries. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Arabic and Persian writers composed texts explaining various Sāsānī words to their Arabicand Persian-speaking audiences. As early as the 13th century, speakers of this language referred to it as al-sīn and non-speakers named it lughat/lisān al-ghurabāʾ (the language of the Gypsies). The language, in name and application, was not identified with a territory or an ethnicity, but rather with a peripatetic tribal group, the Banū Sāsān, whose members worked as beggars and entertainers.

However, speakers of this language called it lughat Banī Sāsān (the language of the Sāsān clan) or lughat al-shaykh Sāsān (the language of the Master Sāsān). In 10th-century Arabic sources produced in Būyid Iraq and Iran, non-speakers named this language lughat al-mukaddīn (the language of the beggars), another demonstration of an outsider’s perspective. It is a mixed language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads, or Gypsy 1 groups.

In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period.

Gypsies by Bart McDowell