Diachronica - Volume 40, Issue 5, 2023

The present paper investigates the reduction of gender assignment and agreement in a nineteenth-century Romani variety in contact with genderless Hungarian. This reduction took place within two generations of native speakers. We compare the geographical and sociolinguistic situation with the majority of present-day Romani varieties, which still maintain the original two-way (masculine, feminine) gender system. By comparing these varieties with the few Romani varieties which also display reduction of their gender system, we show that the development of this particular typological change may be the outcome of the minority situation of Romani and its geographical proximity to a genderless language. However, as rural varieties do not exhibit the same kind of erosion, this is not a sufficient explanation; what also appears to play a role in the Romani case is the urban context of the change. This sociolinguistic factor might also be considered in other case studies on the loss of grammatical gender.

Here, we provide new perspectives on the relationship between the extinct Angolan language Kwadi and the Khoe languages of southern Africa. Using an innovative approach which combines newly collected data from two Kwadi rememberers with a reanalysis of historical recordings and fieldnotes, we were able to reconstitute the Kwadi phoneme inventory and relate Kwadi to Proto-Khoe and its daughter branches Khoekhoe and Kalahari Khoe through regular sound correspondences. Our reconstruction of 127 lexical roots in form and meaning provides further evidence for a Khoe-Kwadi language family and shows that the lexical and phonological proximity between Proto-Khoe-Kwadi and Proto-Khoe is closer than would be expected from the significant differences that Khoe and Kwadi display in the domains of morphology and syntax. Taken together, our study contributes to a better understanding of diachronic sound change in languages with phonemic click sounds and introduces novel ways to incorporate different historical data sources.