The book examines some of the dilemmas surrounding Europe’s open borders, migrations, and identities through the prism of the Roma – Europe’s most dispersed and socially marginalised population. The ...volume challenges some of the myths surrounding the Roma as a ‘problem population’, and places the focus instead on the context of European policy and identity debates. It comes to the conclusion that the migration of Roma and the constitution of their communities is shaped by European policy as much as and often more so than by the cultural traits of the Roma themselves. The chapters compare case studies of Roma migrants in Spain, Italy, France, and Britain, and the impact of migration on the origin communities in Romania. The study combines historical and ethnographic methods with insights from migration studies, drawing on a unique multi-site collaborative project that for the first time gave Roma participants a voice in shaping research into their communities.
Romani political mobilisation is now an established part of the civil society landscape across Europe. It has given rise to various forms of political participation, with Romani NGOs taking up ...consultative roles in a number of countries, as well as in inter-governmental organisations. Models of direct political representation of Roma through a kind of quota system exist at the level of local government in Hungary and in the national elections in Romania, and a number of parliamentarians of Romani background have held direct mandates in national legislatives and in the European Parliament
The Council of Europe definition of anti-Gypsyism focuses on the role of stereotypes and violent practices in the exclusion of the Roma. Research has shown that authorities have a tendency to embrace ...anti-Gypsyist attitudes and to implement overtly securitising policies that further entrench the exclusion of the Roma. Research has also shown that, besides established stereotypes, new ones are emerging. Drawing on our experience as observing participants in the development and implementation of Manchester City Council’s Roma Strategy, we will show how the strategy was aimed to prevent violent anti-Gypsyism, but how stereotypes nonetheless infiltrated its implementation and, finally, how the mobilisation of the Roma successfully challenged these stereotypes. The paper argues that current definitions of anti-Gypsyism are unable to capture instances of essentialist and pathologising discourses that inform interventions aiming at Roma inclusion but which may in fact perpetuate their marginalisation. The paper therefore challenges the notion that stereotypes only inform exclusionary or securitising interventions. The paper will show how academic research can be mobilised to dismiss stereotypes and to inspire the Roma to take action and challenge benevolent but nonetheless stereotyping interventions.
The Mitrovica Roma have been scattered across Europe since the ethnic conflict in
Kosovo. Their dialect was identified as a Gurbet variety, but has not yet being exhaustively
documented. This article ...aims at filling this gap by presenting the grammar of
the dialect. Data have been collected in Palermo, Italy, and are presented following the
Romani Morpho-Syntax database format. Phonological, morphological and syntactic
features are described, highlighting those helpful in classifying the dialect in a geographic–
historical perspective. Many features are shared with Vlax dialects of Romani,
originating in Walachia and Moldavia, which is taken as an indication of the origin of
the Mitrovica dialect in Vlax territories. Mitrovica Romani participates in innovations
originating in the south-western Balkans but not reaching Vlax territories, suggesting
a relatively early migration of the community to the southern Balkans.
Service providers in Western welfare states have to engage with an increasingly differentiated citizenry. The arrival of new migrant communities triggers debates, negotiations and struggles over the ...needs of these communities and how service providers can engage with them. In this paper, we look at these processes of developing local social inclusion policies that target migrant communities through the perspective of Nancy Fraser's ‘politics of need interpretation’. More specifically, we analyse Roma engagement strategies in Manchester. We do so by reconstructing how the presence of Romanian Roma emerged as a public issue leading to various engagement strategies and how different actors competed over the interpretation of the needs of the Roma community and the best ways to respond to them. We use Fraser's notion of ‘parity of participation’ to draw attention to the position of the Roma community itself in the process of interpreting needs.
The Kangjlari of Ţăndărei in southeastern Romania offer an interesting case study of the consolidation within just a few generations of a new Romani community, as a result of state-sponsored ...relocation and settlement between 1950 and 1980. We discuss the linguistic implications of the formation of this new community, drawing on language material from questionnaire elicitation and life history interviews among recent migrants now living in the UK, and supported by access to local ethnographic and archive material in the origin community. We show how a process of dialect levelling is underway in the Romani variety spoken by the Roma of Ţăndărei, which resembles cases of koineization discussed for a number of other languages in recent sociolinguistic literature. The stabilization of a particular combination of features means that the variety under discussion cannot be accommodated into current dialect classification models. This has implications for our general understanding of dialect formation in Romani. The paper also offers the very first modern, concise grammatical sketch of a Romani variety from Romania.
The fall of the Eastern Block, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the subsequent enlargement of the European Union to include former socialist countries contributed to an increase in the ...movement of people from Eastern to Western Europe which began about a decade earlier. Among them, the Roma are probably the most clearly recognizable group and surely the ones that received, and keep receiving, more media attention. While their presence in the media as subjects of discussion is a topic worth analyzing, the present work is about their presence in a particular medium, the Internet, as actors and producers of content. As a population of Indian origin spread across Europe over the past five centuries, Roma have often been regarded as a diaspora. Ethnographic studies about diasporas and their usage of the Internet have often described diasporic websites as discoursive spaces in which new, hydrid identities are negotiated and stereotyping and marginalizing discourses about diasporic subjects are challenged. The role of languages in these websites, however, has often been neglected. On the other hand, sociolinguistic studies have highlighted how the Internet provides a space for vernacular language usage in which the relaxation of language norms and users’ creativity play a crucial role in overcoming the limitations in text transmission imposed by the medium. A partial bridge between these two trends of studies has been provided by the analysis of code-switching in diasporic websites, which has shown how meaningful language alternation is used to flag users’ hybrid identities. The study of the relationship between diasporic languages and identities on the Internet clearly appears to be in its infancy and only few case studies have looked at the interactions between each diaspora’s specific cultural and sociolinguistic settings and the usage of the Internet. Furthermore, many diasporas, including the Roma, speak unwritten languages which have not been or are just starting to be standardized. Processes of language standardization have always involved both identity and language policies and have often been pivotal in struggles for nationhood or minority rights recognition. While so far such processes tended to be mostly centralized and top-down, the Internet is offering a space for the spontaneous transition from orality to literacy. Thus, analyzing the interaction between diasporic, non-standardized languages and the identities of their speakers as manifested on the Internet can provide new insights into the relations between diasporic languages and identities and into language standardization processes. The present work investigates these issues by analyzing the on-line usage of Romani, the Indic language spoken by many Roma. The study draws on data collected through an online ethnography from Radio Romani Mahala, a website created and used by the recently dispersed community of the Mitrovica Roma. The data are analyzed both qualitatively, using discourse analytic methods, and quantitatively, using traditional sociolinguistic approaches. Combining such approaches allows drawing a nuanced picture of the phenomena under observation accounting both for micro level, individual patterns of usage and macro level trends shared by all users involved. Particular attention is also paid to the emerging Romani spelling and the role played by individual users in the establishment of shared writing norms. The interdisciplinarity of this approach will show how the interplay between diasporic identities and attitudes, non-standard language ideologies and the possibilities offered by the Internet is leading to effective language codification without the intervention of a central authority and outside the frame of any nation-state policy. Such findings call for a re-thinking of current notions on linguistic human rights. Based on the viability of the Romani model, I thus propose a theory of linguistic pluralism in trans-national contexts centred around the notion of cosmopolitan sociabilities, non-utilitarian, everyday interactions creating open and inclusive relations across and even despite perceived cultural divides.
The fall of the Eastern Block, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the subsequent enlargement of the European Union to include former socialist countries contributed to an increase in the ...movement of people from Eastern to Western Europe which began about a decade earlier. Among them, the Roma are probably the most clearly recognizable group and surely the ones that received, and keep receiving, more media attention. While their presence in the media as subjects of discussion is a topic worth analyzing, the present work is about their presence in a particular medium, the Internet, as actors and producers of content. As a population of Indian origin spread across Europe over the past five centuries, Roma have often been regarded as a diaspora. Ethnographic studies about diasporas and their usage of the Internet have often described diasporic websites as discoursive spaces in which new, hydrid identities are negotiated and stereotyping and marginalizing discourses about diasporic subjects are challenged. The role of languages in these websites, however, has often been neglected. On the other hand, sociolinguistic studies have highlighted how the Internet provides a space for vernacular language usage in which the relaxation of language norms and users' creativity play a crucial role in overcoming the limitations in text transmission imposed by the medium. A partial bridge between these two trends of studies has been provided by the analysis of code-switching in diasporic websites, which has shown how meaningful language alternation is used to flag users' hybrid identities. The study of the relationship between diasporic languages and identities on the Internet clearly appears to be in its infancy and only few case studies have looked at the interactions between each diaspora's specific cultural and sociolinguistic settings and the usage of the Internet. Furthermore, many diasporas, including the Roma, speak unwritten languages which have not been or are just starting to be standardized. Processes of language standardization have always involved both identity and language policies and have often been pivotal in struggles for nationhood or minority rights recognition. While so far such processes tended to be mostly centralized and top-down, the Internet is offering a space for the spontaneous transition from orality to literacy. Thus, analyzing the interaction between diasporic, non-standardized languages and the identities of their speakers as manifested on the Internet can provide new insights into the relations between diasporic languages and identities and into language standardization processes. The present work investigates these issues by analyzing the on-line usage of Romani, the Indic language spoken by many Roma. The study draws on data collected through an online ethnography from Radio Romani Mahala, a website created and used by the recently dispersed community of the Mitrovica Roma. The data are analyzed both qualitatively, using discourse analytic methods, and quantitatively, using traditional sociolinguistic approaches. Combining such approaches allows drawing a nuanced picture of the phenomena under observation accounting both for micro level, individual patterns of usage and macro level trends shared by all users involved. Particular attention is also paid to the emerging Romani spelling and the role played by individual users in the establishment of shared writing norms. The interdisciplinarity of this approach will show how the interplay between diasporic identities and attitudes, non-standard language ideologies and the possibilities offered by the Internet is leading to effective language codification without the intervention of a central authority and outside the frame of any nation-state policy. Such findings call for a re-thinking of current notions on linguistic human rights. Based on the viability of the Romani model, I thus propose a theory of linguistic pluralism in trans-national contexts centred around the notion of cosmopolitan sociabilities, non-utilitarian, everyday interactions creating open and inclusive relations across and even despite perceived cultural divides.
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