Attitudes towards the mother tongue among Roma in Poland

Abstract

An assumption shared for years by Romani studies scholars is that the Roma language is seminal to the group’s identity. The text is an in-depth analysis of the beliefs of Roma in Poland regarding their mother tongue. The inspiration for this exploration stems from a theoretical model shedding light on correlations between knowledge of the Romani language and the Roma ethnic identity, the model Marushiakova and Popov developed with reference to the situation of Roma in Central Eastern Europe. The paper focuses on the question: What meaning do Roma in Poland assign to knowledge of the Romani language in the construction of their own ethnic identity? The authors argue that irrespective of the fact that the mother tongue currently appears to be a key element of group identity, Romaniness contains the potential to reproduce itself even under circumstances of language abandonment and even among the most conservative Romani groups. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .