This concrete aspect one can be deduced keeping in mind all developed in the sections of the
Current social situation in Europe and in
specific places dedicated to each European country . It will be presented here, however, a general diagnosis of the state of the romany varieties in the european continent.
The romany is a language (or group of languages) that until very recently it did not enjoy a written form, and then this was only transmitted in an oral way. This it has also been decisive for the non-develop a standard code or some prescriptive norms. The linguistic situation, also, is the reflection of the socio-political situation of the different gipsy communities in Europe: politics, economic and culturally excluded, ethnically stigmatized, discriminated against and pursued, victims of genocides, etc., they can only survive in small groups. This situation have ended in the geographical and sociolinguistic heterogeneity that it still exists today. Consequently, the romany people has not been in position to build some stable politico-economic structures and to get this way a political and economic power. Taking into account that the standard development of varieties generally continues to the development of powerful political and economic structures, it is quite clear why the romany does not have a coded standard norm, as well as the impossibility that it develops a norm generally accepted in the mentioned linguistic heterogeneity.
For most of the romany people, their respective romany variety is reduced to the communication intra-group being only limited to a domain (only in the family-intimate domain). Most of the speakers are bilingual or multilingual and they use the majority language of the community where they inhabit for the communication inter-group public and for the public domains. As a result of this, it is not possible to establish a social stratification inside the individual varieties of romany. The situation in the regions where gipsy communities conserve the romany is the following one:
Basilect: use domain deprived in intimate situations
Mesolect: informal public domain of use in public situations beyond the strictly private ones (communication with people outside of the family environment, work, etc.)
Acrolect: public and institutionalized domain of use in the institutions and public spheres of the daily life of a society (school, administration...)
This sketch shows the most optimistic situation with an almost complete range of functions. This situation can be, for example, in the case of the
kalderash romany , that it dominates the sphere of internal communication and, also, it is used in contact with speaking of other
Vlax varieties. The most average situation, however, is that the romany is only used for the most intimate dimensions together with the majority language.
These limitations in the functional dimensions, together with the lack of a norm and a written language, are the biggest reasons for the fact that the romany does not have prestige in the majority population and among the gipsy population, those which, in many occasions, they consider to the romany like an inferior language or of less value in comparison with the majority one.
The reduced prestige of the language, the reduced domains that this enjoys and the constant pressure that the gipsies suffer to be assimilated to the dominant culture makes that the relationship of this language with the languages wich it cohabits is never bilateral or balanced, but asymmetric. As a result, the contact phenomenons go toward the loss of the romany varieties, and they go from the situation of lexical loan from the majority language to the monolingual of gipsycommunity in favor of the official languages of the state in which they inhabits. An example of this process is the case of the para-varieties mentioned in the classification of the romany groups, where it is reflected how the minority language finishes degenerating on the whole of lexical features and, if at all, morphologics that are sustained on the grammatical base of the majority language: the spanish caló , the englishanglo-romany , the errumantxela basque, the skando-romany varieties of Resande, the greek dortika (already extinct), the Armenian lomavren, etc. Like examples of the spanish caló and the anglo-romaní:
The final step of the disintegration of the language is, as it has already been mentioned, the loss of the language. In this way, many groups of Rome have changed their languages for the dominant ones, although this situation does not imply that they have lost all their culture or ethnic values. The romany people that live today in Rumania ,
Bulgaria , Greece or Serbia, for example, has the rumanian as mother tonge, although they still feel as romany people. In Hungary , on the other hand, the Rumanian is the mother tongue of the gipsy population's 10% (called " Beas "), and Hungarian the 70%; the romany language in this country, however, is only approximately the maternal language of 20%.
A square summary that it could illustrate how this process of disappearance of the romany languages works, and how each generation of gipsies goes losing competence in the maternal language for use lack, it could be the following one:
Bilingualism of loss in the second generation of gipsies settled down in a country: it is used more the dominant language that the maternal one for status differences and of social prestige.
Loss of the romany language: the gipsies of the third generation from now on will assume as maternal language the characteristic of the dominant society, and they will only have a vague knowledge of which was the maternal language of their predecessors for the contact with these (grandparents). The biggest use in the language dominant part of the parents, and the biggest competence in this, therefore, causes that these finish using it in the family means, that makes their children to learn it as mother tongue.
Obviously, the velocity of this process varies in function of many factors. The reason for which even many millions of romany people conserve their language, amazingly and given the extreme conditions in which the blunt different groups are, it is related with the attitudes of rejection that are usually generated, in the affected group, because the evident exclusion that these suffer. This gives place to the opposition to the assimilation, causing of this way behaviors more racist and more excluding on the part of the dominant community. It is of a vicious circle that perpetuates the situation, and that it usually ends up when the minority community is assimilated completely. However, the positive current situation makes hope the romany language will continue contributing to the linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe.
