Borrowing of phonological rules: case studies from Romani, Armenian and Yiddish and some general reflections
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 <i>akanie</i> 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.