Borrowing of phonological rules: case studies from Romani, Armenian and Yiddish and some general reflections

Abstract

Borrowing of phonological rules is a topic that has received scant attention outside the domain of language learning. If transferring of L1 phonological rules in L2 utterances is a banal phenomenon, more interesting is the case in which phonological rules borrowing affects a still well preserved minority language, innovating its syntagmatic phonology. In these cases the intra-communitarian language of a minority community adopts, partially or totally, the phonological rules of the inter-communitarian language, i.e. of the language of the majority community. The article discusses several examples of phonological rules borrowing, notably two Italo-Romance phonological rules borrowed in Abruzzian Romani, Turkic vowel harmony in the Armenian dialect of Karchevan and Belarus akanie in Belarus Yiddish. After discussing the rules and the way they have been imported, the article proposes some general reflections about the structural and sociolinguistic background of the phenomenon.