Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0, University of Potsdam (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: Around 86.000 Irish Travellers live all over the world and define themselves by an unusual and unique lifestyle. They see themselves as a distinct ethnic group that lives within settled society. This view is underlined by a language that is only spoken amongst the members of the travelling community. Shelta – a language which strongly withholds the grip of linguistic researchers until today and which also protects its speakers and the community’s identity from non-acceptance and feelings of inferiority. In advance I have to make clear that many – though interesting – but conflicting assumptions have been made on Irish Travellers and have yet to be proven. Not only more research has to be done in order to discover the roots of Travellers and their language, but also a way has to be found to make it possible for Irish Travellers to feel like a part of the society they live in. In my paper I will briefly introduce the most important issues on Irish Travellers, go more into detail concerning the use and the structure of Shelta, and discuss the assumptions on its origin and value.

This volume covers the language situation in the Baltic States, Ireland and Italy explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation - including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages.

This book explores the Irish Traveller community through an ethnographic and folk linguistic lens. It sheds new light on Irish Traveller language, commonly referred to as Gammon or Cant, an integral part of the community’s cultural heritage that has long been viewed as a form of secret code. The author addresses Travellers’ metalinguistic and ideological reflections on their language use, providing deep insights into the culture and values of community members, and into their perceived social reality in wider society. In doing so, she demonstrates that its interrelationship with other cultural elements means that the language is in a constant flux, and by analysing speakers’ experiences of language in action, provides a dynamic view of language use. The book takes the reader on a journey through oral history, language naming practices, ideologies of languageness and structure, descriptions of language use and contexts, negotiations of the ‘authentic’ Cant, and Cant as ‘identity’. Based on a two-year ethnographic fieldwork project in a Traveller Training Centre in the West of Ireland, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language in society, language ideology, folk linguistics, minority communities and languages, and cultural and linguistic anthropology.

This volume explores the discourses and representations that have circumvented the image that is the Traveller, the Roma (Gypsy) and migrant “Other”. It is generally acknowledged that the globalisation and mass-media dissemination which characterise the current era have overseen a range of complex socio-cultural forces, many of which have blurred the once-reified borders of the post-Enlightenment, “modern”, nation-state. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of cultural diasporas and “traditionally”- nomadic groups such as Travellers, Roma and other migrant cultures. This book points to the ongoing reconfiguration of once-dominant cultural narratives and explores the manner whereby aspects of the migrant experience are themselves echoed in the increasingly hybrid and diverse discourses that characterise Western countries of the present-day.

Travellers, have historically been separated from the larger group of Irish society; customs and practices emphasise the division and reinforce Travellers' internal security: the main symbol of their difference, their linguistic code, which operates as a secret or protective language, is known variously as Shelta, Gammon or Cant. The Thesis provides a critical examination of the historical and academic analysis to date of Shelta and reports on the results of an empirical study carried out by the researcher into sociolmguistic aspects of Shelta in Ireland today. Theories about the background and history of Irish Travellers are reviewed and the relationship between Travellers and Gypsies is analysed. Traveller identity and aspects of Traveller culture are examined with particular emphasis on family organization and ritual cleanliness because these show how Travellers maintain the borders between themselves and settled people. The Gypsy language, Romani, is well known and has been widely studied. Shelta has been less documented and its relationship with English Cant has been obscure. A theory is put forward about this historical relationship. Up to now, Shelta has generally been considered to be an artifically devised jargon constructed for disguise purposes. It is suggested, however, that there is reason to believe that Shelta may be the remains of a natural language augmented by a disguised vocabulary from Irish and English, having moved to an English syntactic structure. In recent years, Travellers have undergone rapid social change: their former patterns of employment have been rendered obsolete and there has been a movement towards the towns. Changes in Shelta are examined in this new context and the future role of Shelta as part of Traveller culture is considered.