The Romani dialect of Ajios Athanasios is spoken by approximately 1.800 speakers in a suburb of the city of Serres in Northern Greece. The dialect belongs to the Balkan Romani dialect group and it is described for the first time. Two reasons make AA an interesting case study for Balkan Romani: Firstly, as AA lost contact with other Balkan dialects early on, it developed innovative features in isolation and retained a large number of archaisms. Secondly, AA is an appropriate dialect for studying language contact between Balkan Romani and Greek. Contact with Greek has been crucial to the linguistic history of Romani.

The aim of this study is to provide a detailed grammatical description of AA and to compare AA to other Balkan Romani dialects. The first chapter deals with descriptive phonology and certain issues of historical phonology. The second chapter deals with inflectional and derivational morphology of nominal and verbal categories. The third chapter, on syntax, investigates coordination, subordination and constituent order. The fourth chapter discusses morphological borrowing of AA - and Balkan Romani - from Greek. The fifth chapter concerns the replication of Balkan constructions in AA. The concluding chapter on dialect classification discusses the internal relations of Balkan Romani dialects. Archaisms, innovations, phonological phenomena such as palatalisations, and morphosyntactic phenomena such as cliticisation, are presented in tables and on maps.