Abstract
Domari: a moribund language of Jerusalem
Yaron Matras, University of Manchester
Domari is the name of a language spoken by peripatetic communities across the Middle East, currently attested mainly in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. The paper focuses on the variety spoken in Jerusalem, which is the only one to have been documented extensively (Matras 2012). Domari is an Indic language, which shows some archaic features, but also a language that has been heavily influenced by contact, especially with Arabic. The language was already endangered when I began my documentation in Jerusalem in 1996, and is now moribund, and probably has just one single living fluent speaker and a few semi-speakers. The paper discusses the ethnographic setting, the language’s history and the reasons for its abandonment, and theoretical dilemmas of description and analysis that arise through the wholesale import of entire categories from Arabic into Domari, including what I term ‘bilingual suppletion’ (the reliance on Arabic structures in certain paradigmatic positions).