Mixed language in the context of "Pidgin"

The Romani people (/ˈroʊməni/ or /ˈrɒməni/), also known as the Roma (sg.: Rom) or Romanies (sg.: Romany), are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who traditionally lived a nomadic lifestyle. Although they are widely dispersed, their most concentrated populations are believed to be in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia. In the English language, Romani people have long been known by the exonym Gypsies or Gipsies and this remains the most common English term for the group. Some Roma use and embrace this term while others consider it to be derogatory or an ethnic slur.

Romani culture has been influenced by their time spent under various reigns and empires, notably the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The Romani language is an Indo-Aryan language with strong Persian, Armenian, Byzantine Greek and South Slavic influence. It is divided into several dialects, which together are estimated to have over 2 million speakers. Many Roma are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence, or else of mixed languages that combine the dominant language with a dialect of Romani in varieties sometimes called para-Romani.

Romani (/ˈrɒməni, ˈroʊ-/ ROM-ə-nee, ROH-; also Romanes /ˈrɒmənɪs/ ROM-ən-iss, Romany, Roma; Romani: rromani ćhib) is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani people. The largest Romani dialects are Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak mixed languages based on the surrounding language with retained Romani-derived vocabulary – these are known by linguists as Para-Romani varieties, rather than dialects of the Romani language itself.

The differences between the various varieties can be as large as, for example, the differences between the Slavic languages.

Para-Romani are various mixed languages of non-Indo-Aryan linguistic classification containing considerable admixture from the Romani language. They are spoken as the traditional vernacular of Romani communities, either in place of, or alongside, varieties of the Romani language. Some Para-Romani languages have no structural features of Romani at all, taking only the vocabulary from Romani.

Reflecting the northern Indian subcontinent origin (in regions that are today part of India and Pakistan) of the Romani people, who for the last millennium have resided in dispersed locations predominantly throughout Europe, the linguistic makeup of most Para-Romani languages is based on Indo-European languages, except for Laiuse Romani (which is based on Estonian) and Erromintxela (which is based on Basque of the Basque region of Spain and France, separate from the Caló Iberian Romani language of Spain and Portugal based on the Romance languages of Iberia).

Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or linguistic varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Intensive language contact may result in language convergence or relexification. In some cases a new contact language may be created as a result of the influence, such as a pidgin, creole, or mixed language. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs with smaller-scale lasting effects on the language; these may include the borrowing of loanwords, calques, or other types of linguistic material.

A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar (e.g., by eliminating irregularities). Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.

The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the European Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay.

A lexifier is the language that provides the basis for the majority of a pidgin or creole language's vocabulary (lexicon). Often this language is also the dominant, or superstrate language, though this is not always the case, as can be seen in the historical Mediterranean Lingua Franca. In mixed languages, there are no superstrates or substrates, but instead two or more adstrates. One adstrate still contributes the majority of the lexicon in most cases, and would be considered the lexifier. However, it is not the dominant language, as there are none in the development of mixed languages, such as in Michif.

Dano-Norwegian (Danish and Norwegian: dansk-norsk) was a koiné/mixed language that evolved among the urban elite in Norwegian cities during the later years of the union between the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway (1536/1537–1814). It is from this koiné that the unofficial written standard Riksmål and the official written standard Bokmål developed. Bokmål is now the most widely used written standard of contemporary Norwegian.

Arabic Afrikaans (Afrikaans: Arabies Afrikaans, Arabic Afrikaans: عربس افركانس) or Lisan-e-Afrikaans (Arabic Afrikaans: لسانِ افرکانس) is a form of Afrikaans written in the Perso-Arabic script. It began in the 1830s in the madrasa in Cape Town, South Africa. Beside a 16th-century manuscript in the German language written with Arabic script, it is the only Germanic language known to have been written in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic Afrikaans is not a mixed language.