Abstract
The chapter serves as a descriptive introduction to the complex sound system of the Romani language. It provides an outline of the core phoneme inventory common to all dialects, complemented by the various dialect-specific modification processes affecting both vowels and consonants, and introduces a varied set of contact-induced additional phonemes. It describes phonological processes such as aspiration, lengthening, hiatus, gemination, diphthongisation, and the reduction of vowels and consonant clusters, in a cross-dialectal perspective. Phenomena such as palatalisation, including aspects of morphological jotation, the appearance and position of semi-vowels, the treatment of affricates and their relationship to fricatives and stops, the distribution of the schwa and the fate of the retroflex consonants are dealt with in detail, providing examples from a plethora of Romani varieties, based on the Romani Morpho-Syntax Database.
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The support of the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (grants K 111961 and K 125596, principal investigator: László Kálmán) is gratefully acknowledged.
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Baló, M.A. (2020). Romani Phonology. In: Matras, Y., Tenser, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28105-2_5
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