Finnish Romani during the 20th century

This paper discusses the history of Finnish Romani during the 20th century. The 20th century was a period of decreasing use of Finnish Romani and internal language erosion, resulting in the co-existence of inflecting Romani retaining its morpho-syntactic framework, and a Para-Romani-like variety. Numerous attested changes in Finnish Romani were attributed to the contact of the speakers of Romani with Finnish. This paper is based on a corpus comprising most written documents of Finnish Romani from the 20th century, comprising religious texts, textbooks, wordlists and dictionaries. This paper follows the theoretical framework as commonly used in European and Finnish Romani Linguistics during the 1990s and 2000s. Starting points for explaining language variation and change are functional-typological. The focus is on language-internal changes, innovations vs. conservative features, as well as on contact-induced changes. In addition, this paper deals with variation and linguistic attrition, which characterized Finnish Romani of the 20th century. This paper shows that tendencies of language-internal change both simplified the language structure and significantly increased the amount of linguistic variation. The paper also shows that matter replication is later and occurs more rarely in FR than pattern replication.