“Form” and “function” in Soviet Stage Romani: Modeling metapragmatics through performance institutions

Abstract

A crucial division of linguistic labor is that among metalinguistic labors. Who is authorized to speak about language, how, and where? Language ideologies not only ascribe different functions to different languages; they also ascribe different sorts of metadiscourse to speakers of (or about) those languages. Drawing from archival and field work, this article traces the ways particular Soviet and post-Soviet institutions and actors modeled and regimented metapragmatic discourses, specifically through stage and screen practices and representations that hypercontextualized utterances in Romani. They became so hegemonic that, in public arenas, Romani speakers spoke only about nonreferential functions; only in less well broadcast contexts (and mainly with other Roma) did they articulate metalinguistic and metareferential discourses. These practices reverse and contrast with the mainstream metapragmatics of Russian. Language ideologies commonly rank codes and metadiscourses; this case illuminates not only that they do so, but also how they do so, and it suggests what their social effects may be.

The Kitchen, the Cat, and the Table: Domestic Affairs in Minority‐Language Politics

“…But linguistic bifurcation in these cases is not limited to a functional diglossic split between Russian and the native language. There is also functional bifurcation within the native language, such as between Soviet Stage Romani and the standard language (Lemon ), or between more and less purist ways of speaking Tatar (Wertheim ), Ukrainian (Bilaniuk ), or Belarussian (Woolhiser ). Though a standardized form of the native language is used in institutions and in texts printed and speeches read for symbolic political purposes, average speakers are not necessarily competent in this standard, and may use a variety of dialects, colloquialisms, or syncretic forms outside of official or ritualized contexts.…”

Fire in the dark: telling Gypsiness in north east England

“…This in turn risks denying the paradoxical experience of Gypsiness where one is not simply able to move through a more or less `porous' boundary (Goffman 1986: 126 cited in Lemon ibid: 23), for instance between performer and audience, but where one is always and inescapably both of these. For Lemon this leads to an analysis of the power relations that are implicit in representations of Gypsy performance (Lemon 2002).…”

“…Roma do not live between "two worlds" but in one world of many overlapping spaces. (Lemon, A;2000: 211) Gypsies on Teesside occupy a number of different and sometimes conflicting social positions simultaneously, creating multiple layers of overlapping social identities. These multiple layers of interaction are evidence of the complexity of being `Gypsy' -a complexity that cannot be contained within any neat and singular model of identity, and which requires the existence of ill-defined spaces (material and metaphorical wastelands)…”

The Historical Certainty of the Interpretively Uncertain: Non‐Referentiality and Georgian Modernity

“…See also Pomorska et al. 1987 and Lemon 2002:34–5. Niko Marr's son Iurii (1893–1935) was also a minor zaum' poet.…”