A Lombard Sinti ethno-text on mourning and marriage

The ethno-text presented in this contribution concerns some cultural practices connected with mourning and marriage in use in the Lombard Sinti communities. In the landscape of Romani varieties spoken in Italy by Roma and Sinti of old settlement, the dialect of Lombard Sinti shows a good degree of intergenerational transmission and retention of inherited Indo-Aryan morphology. Of course, as all Romani varieties, the Romani dialect spoken by Lombard Sinti presents many innovations as well, especially in the lexicon. The text is a good example of the Lombard Sinti speech characterized by frequent instances of code-switching and code-mixing. Some peculiar features and innovations of this Romani dialect, emerging here and there in the text, are shortly discussed in the final part of the paper.