USING ROMANI IN LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN A CZECH ROM FAMILY (e-paper)

In the Czech Republic language shift has been observed since 1970’s among the speakers of the North Central dialects of Romani, who lived for centuries in Rom settlements in the Slovak countryside and have moved after WW2 to the Czech part of former Czechoslovakia. So far, the shift has been studied more quantitatively and as a macrosocietal phenomenon. The paper focuses on using languages in one extended family of recent migrants from Slovakia to the Czech Republic, who use Romani as a regular means of interaction with the exception of child directed speech (CDS). The patterns of using languages (and especially of some remaining Romani) in CDS is contextualized with wider concepts of language ideologies and child upbringing ideologies. In this particular domain, Romani is often used in a self-assertive manner, which is partially mirrored in a way how children themselves use “scraps” of Romani. This type of use seems to fit into the parents’ ideology of good and bad comportment of their children, which supplements an explanation of the Rom parents who claim that preference of using Czech in CDS is motivated by the expectation from the part of the school of the children’s good competence in Czech.