In his book, "Romani: A Linguistic Introduction," Yaron Matras thoroughly covers the Romani ("Gypsy") language to the finest detail: Its origin, grammar, morphology, phonology, along with current dialects and their distributions. Well-written and close to 300 pages (including many carefully made charts and hundreds of references), this book is a perfect companion for a university course on Romani Linguistics.



The purchaser of this book should know the linguistic terms that are commonly used in academic analysis on language. They should also know that this is not a "Teach Yourself" guide to Romani. There is no glossary or dictionary. There are no dialogs or narratives. Furthermore, Matras' book does not cover anything about the culture of the people who speak Romani, or their history (except when addressing historical language change.) This book is intended as a reference for linguists; as such, it is scholarly and complete. It does not pretend to be anything else.



Yaron Matras did a superb job in compiling this book, considering how difficult it is to get information on this exotic and very under-represented language. The prose is sometimes a little dry, but this is customary in academia.