A Caló Lexicon with data about its knowledge by a group of Spanish Gitanos or Calé

Title: A Caló Lexicon with data about its knowledge by a group of Spanish Gitanos or Calé
Source document: Gamella, Juan F.; Adiego, Ignasi-Xavier; Fernández Ortega, Cayetano. Interacciones entre el caló y el español : historia, relaciones y fuentes. Buzek, Ivo (Editor). Primera edición Brno: Filozofická fakulta, Masarykova univerzita, 2016, pp. 113-135
Extent
113-135
Type
Chapter
Language
English
Caló/Romani
License: Not specified license
Description
For the last two centuries, most evidences show that the use of Caló has been withering away from the Spanish Roma community (Gitanos). It is a well-known fact. But there are few data on the actual knowledge and use of Caló by Gitanos themselves. To study these processes we developed a questionnaire that included a Caló wordlist with 360 key terms from 16 major semantic fields, and we applied it to an intentional sample of 68 Gitano persons in Andalusia. As far as we know, this was the first extended and comprehensive study to consider usage patterns and the knowledge base of a large sample of potential speakers. The results have been published elsewhere (See Gamella et al. 2015). Here we present the vocabulary used in this study with its 290 Spanish and English translations. We also present the number and percentage of Gitano persons who recognized each of the Caló items, and the main lexical variations offered by users themselves. The list could be compared with other recent and past Caló vocabularies to establish the losses and remaining items of this agonizing language.