Learnability Theory and Rural Roma Children’s Knowledge of Languages: An Empirical Psycholinguistic Comparative Study

Purpose The purpose of the study is to examine Learnability Theory (Valiant, 1984) in the process of learning of L2 Bulgarian and Czech languages by preschool Roma children. Roma children grow up in a rich oral culture and learn their mother tongue from the members of extended families, but how they learn the L2 and which factors facilitate the process second language acquisition (SLA) is not clear. Methods. 20 bilingual Roma children from Bulgaria and 20 bilingual Roma children from the Czech Republic (in two age groups 4–5 and 5–6-years-old) were tested with linguistic tests on their knowledge, centering on their ability to learn new grammatical categories. The children were tested with a specially developed test, bearing in mind the peculiarities of Romani grammatical categories. The same grammatical categories were tested in the official languages of the countries where the children live – in the Bulgarian and Czech languages. Results. The findings show that the children from Bulgaria are much better in learning Bulgarian than the Roma children from Czech Republic learning Czech. There is a connection between the knowledge of the Roma children of their mother tongue and the official language. The data shows that the Bulgarian Roma children know their mother tongue much better and this helps them to better learn Bulgarian, while the Czech Roma children have a comparatively poor knowledge of Romani and they acquire the Czech ethnolect – the variety of Czech spoken by Roma, which differs from official standard Czech. Conclusions. The study showed that learning grammatical categories form a new language in early age dependence form the language knowledge and experiences of the child in their mother tongue. The new knowledge in a new language is acquired based on the old knowledge in the mother tongue. This is shown also in other studies, for example with Turkish bilingual children, that the knowledge in mother tongue helps learning a new language.