The Language of Bayash Communities in Central and Eastern Hungary

Rosenberg, Mátyás (2019) The Language of Bayash Communities in Central and Eastern Hungary. Documentation. Brill, Hollandia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

According to earlier research, the Bayash living in Hungary were divided into three ethnic subgroups, each of them identifying themselves as Bayash, forming one coherent ethnic group, speaking related language varieties. However, the latest research suggests that none of these statements hold definitely true, since members of these communities perceive them-selves being different in terms of individual and group identity, and their mother tongue also shows great variation, so the question of their ethnic and lingustic identities is more complex. The Arđelan and Munćan communities are much better represented in sociolinguistic papers and descriptive grammars. The third ethnic subgroup which originally located between the rivers Danube and Tisza and beyond the Tisza, whose ethnonym I intentionally leave unspec-ified, is still understudied, excepting a few folksongs and four multidisciplinary studies re-garding their history and ethnography, we do not have data on their variety either. The aim of my paper is to present and analyse some findings of a dialectological field research conducted in Bayash communities. I rely on 50 hours of audio-recorded data provided by 33 subjects, collected in 16 settlements during my fieldwork. In the analysis I discuss phenomena of pho-netics, lexicon, including lexical borrowings of an endangered language variety spoken by terminal speakers, as it seems to have lost its speech community.

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