Romani language

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Romani Romani / रोमानी
Spoken in:	The speakers of Romani are widespread and stateless
Total speakers:	4.8 million
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Central Zone     Romani
Official status
Official language of:	Shuto Orizari (Republic of Macedonia), officially-recognised minority language of Sweden, officially-recognised minority language of Finland, co-official in 79 rural communes in Romania and one town (Budeşti)
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	rom
ISO 639-3:	variously: rom — Romani (generic) rmn — Balkan Romani rml — Baltic Romani rmc — Carpathian Romani rmf — Kalo Finnish Romani rmo — Sinte Romani rmy — Vlax Romani rmw — Welsh Romani
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Romani (or Romany) is the language of the Roma and Sinti, peoples often referred to in English as "Gypsies". The Indo-Aryan Romani language should not be confused with either Romanian (spoken by Romanians), or Romansh (spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland), both of which are Romance languages.

Contents 1 Classification and status 2 History 3 Modern language 4 Mixed languages 5 Standardization 6 Romani loanwords in English 7 Distribution 8 See also 9 Notes and references 10 External links

[edit] Classification and status

Analysis of the Romani language has shown that it is closely related to those spoken in northern India, Punjabi in particular. This linguistic relationship is believed to indicate the Roma's and Sinti's geographical origin. Loanwords in Romani make it possible to trace the pattern of their migration west. They came originally from the Indian subcontinent or what is now northern India and parts of Pakistan. The Romani language is usually included in the Central Indo-Aryan languages (together with Western Hindi, Bhili, Gujarati, Khandeshi, Rajasthani etc.). Current conjecture among activists is that the origin of the name Sinti is the same as that of the toponym for the Sindh region of southeastern Pakistan and far western India (Rajasthan and Gujarat), around the lower Indus River. However, linguists have pointed out that 'Sinti' is in fact a European loanword in Romani, clearly recognizable as such in its morphological integration into the language (plural Sinte, feminine singular Sintica). It was primarily through comparative linguistic studies of the Romani language with various north Indian dialects and languages that the origins of the Roma people were traced back to India.

Romani, Punjabi, and Pothohari share some words and similar grammatical systems. A 2003 study published in Nature suggests Romani is also related to Sinhalese,^[1] presently spoken in Sri Lanka.

The Romani language is considered alternatively a group of dialects or a collection of related languages that comprise all the members of a single genetic subgroup.

While the language is nowhere official, there are attempts currently aimed at the creation of a standard language out of all variants (such as those from Romania, the USA, Sweden). Also, different variants of the language are now in the process of being codified in those countries with high Roma populations (for example, Slovakia).

[edit] History

There are no sure historical documents about the early phases of the Romani language. The language is not directly cited in the epic Shah Name by the 11th century Persian poet Firdausi, who wrote about the 10,000 or 12,000 Desi musicians who were given in the 5th century AD by King Shankal of Kanauj (in Sindh) to Bahram Gur the King of Persia. Nevertheless, many have suggested that these people are the ancestors of the Roma.

However, new research (Masica, 1991:221) shows this to be unlikely. The Romani language proves to be a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), as it would have to be to fit Firdausi's scheme. It has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Until around the year 1000, the Indo-Aryan languages (named MIA) had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). By the turn of the 2nd millennium they changed into the NIA phase, losing the neuter gender. Most of the neuter nouns became masculine while a few feminine, like the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit became the feminine आग (āg) in Hindi and याग (yag) in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages is proposed to prove that the change occurred in the Subcontinent. It is therefore believed that it was not possible that the Romas' ancestors left there prior to 1000.

Most mainstream researchers in Romani linguistics and Romani ethnography hold the view that the exodus of the Rom(a) from India is part of the historical phenomenon of outwards migration from India of castes, specializing in certain trades. These groups will have originated in different areas within India, and spoken different (albeit related) Indian languages, and probably left the subcontinent at different times, taking different routes. However, many of them share ethnonyms that go back to similar caste names: the Rom of Europe, the Lom of the Caucasus and Anatolia, the Dom of the Middle East, are an example, all descending, it is assumed, from the Indian caste of the Ḍom. The latter is a cover-term for itinerant service-providing castes. This origin hypothesis allows to reconcile the linguistic and geographical diversity of minorities of Indian origin living outside of India, with the similarities between them in occupation profile, social status, name, and origin.

However, in recent years political activists and Romani intellectuals have begun to reject this hypothesis, searching instead for a historical narrative that would connect their ancestors with 'high status' groups in Indian society, rather than with the low-status Ḍom. It is in this context that the works of people like Hancock, Lee, Rishi, and Kochanowski are to be interpreted.

It is known that the period of time around 1000 AD was one of great turmoil in the northern part of the Indian Subcontinent. The Muslim invasions wrought havoc and led to massive population movements. The scholar and Romani political activist Ian Hancock and also W.R. Rishi wrote that the Roma ancestors left the Subcontinent as a result of these circumstances. Between the years 1001 and 1026, the Muslim Afghans and Turks known as Ghaznavids made seventeen invasions in the Punjab and Sindh areas, fighting against the local Hindus. The Rajputs played a major role in the resistance. They were a mixture of different jāti (castes) brought together by a common desire to repel the foreign invaders. There are accounts that many of them were captured and sent to Central Asia to be used as conscripts in further fighting, and that others left the war zone, heading west.

These movements of population involved many categories, because the Rajputs would go to war with their families and their associates frequently. According to Hancock, the Romani language sustains the claimed Rajputic ancestry: most of the words related to war are of Indo-Aryan ancestry like bust (spear), patava (gaiters), xanrro (sword), tover (axe) [1]. The name for those who are not Roma, gaje derives from Prakritic gajja (civilian, domestic, non-military). Also there are cultural similarities between Roma and Rajputs and DNA research demonstrates genetic proximity.

The short-lived Ghaznavid Empire was polyglot, but Persian was official. This could explain the share of Persian loanwords in Romani, loans from no earlier than 10th century Persian. However, the greatest changes to the Romani language occurred much further West. The Seljuks (who defeated the Ghaznavids in 1038), also defeated the Byzantine Empire in 1071 and conquered eastern Anatolia.

Historical documents relate the subsequent movement of populations from Central Asia to eastern Anatolia. It seems that it was here that, according to Ian Hancock's thesis, the Romani language evolved as a koine from the many Indo-Aryan languages spoken by the ancestors of the Roma. The original status of Romani as a lingua franca is supported by the vocabulary of Indo-Aryan origin. It cannot be linked to a certain area, but it includes words from all across the northern Subcontinent. During its development, it underwent a certain degree of influence from the local Greek. This influence is secondary in weight after the Indo-Aryan ancestry of the language, both in vocabulary and in grammar (there are some suffixes of Greek origin). Other Anatolian languages contributed to the creation of Romani as well (most notably Armenian).

This is also when it seems that the Roma developed their identity as a distinct people, abandoning the jātī differences. Moreover, they had to adapt to the life of the foreign lands and find economic niches for survival. Analysis of Romani vocabulary indicates that the Romas' ancestors were not originally nomadic. Indo-Aryan words like kher (house), udar (door), gav (village), thagar (king), balo (pig), khaini (hen), giv (wheat) seem to indicate a settled society instead. Words related to nomadism come from Anatolia, where this lifestyle first became common for the Roma. For example, grast (horse) and char (grass) are from Armenian, vurdon (waggon, cart) is from Kurdish, drom (road) and petalo (horseshoe) are from Greek. Also the skills of metalworking were acquired here: the words for metals (except for those for gold, silver and iron, which are Indo-Aryan) are from Greek and Armenian, as well as for the tools used in this field.

The Mongol invasion of Europe beginning in the first half of the 13th Century triggered another westward migration. The Roma arrived in Europe and afterwards spread to the other continents. The great distances between the scattered Romani groups led to the development of local community distinctions. The differing local influences have greatly affected the modern language, splitting it into a number of different (originally exclusively regional) dialects.

Today Romani is spoken by small groups in 42 European countries [2]. A project at Manchester University in England is transcribing Romani dialects, many of which are on the brink of extinction, for the first time. [3]

[edit] Modern language

Today's dialects of Romani are differentiated by the vocabulary accumulated since their departure from Anatolia, as well as through divergent phonemic evolutions and grammatical features. Many Roma no longer speak the language or speak various new contact languages from the local language with the addition of Romani vocabulary.

A long-standing common categorisation was a division between the Vlax (from Vlach) from non-Vlax dialects. Vlax are those Roma who lived many centuries in the territory of Romania. The main distinction between the two groups is the degree to which their vocabulary is borrowed from Romanian. Vlax-speaking groups include the great number of speakers (between half and two-thirds of all Romani speakers). Bernard Gillad Smith first made this distinction, and coined the term Vlax in 1915 in the book The Report on the Gypsy tribes of North East Bulgaria. Subsequently, other groups of dialects were recognized, primarily based on geographical and vocabulary criteria, including:

• Balkan Romani: in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine
• Romani of Wales
• Romani of Finland
• Sinte: in Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Switzerland
• Carpathian Romani: in the Czech Republic, Poland (particularly in the south), Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine
• Baltic Romani: in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (particularly in the north), Belarus, Ukraine and Russia
• Turkish dialects:
  • Rumeli (Thrace) dialect (Thrace, Uskudar, a district on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus): most loanwords are from Greek
  • Anatolian dialect. Most loanwords are from Turkish, Kurdish and Persian
  • Posha dialect, Armenian Gypsies from eastern Anatolia mostly nomads although some have settled in the region of Van, Turkey. The Kurds call them Mytryp (settled ones).

In the past several decades, some scholars have worked out a categorisation of Romani dialects from a linguistic point of view on the basis of historical evolution and isoglosses. In a series of articles (beginning from 1982), Marcel Courthiade proposed a new classification. He concentrates on the dialectal diversity of Romani in three successive strata of expansion, using the criteria of phonological and grammatical changes. Finding the common linguistic features of the dialects, he presents the historical evolution from the first stratum (the dialects closest to the Anatolian Romani of the 13th century) to the second and third strata. He also names as "pogadialects" (after the Pogadi dialect from Great Britain) those which have only a Romani vocabulary grafted into a non-Romani language.

A table of some dialectal differences:

First stratum	Second stratum	Third stratum
phirdom, phirdyom phirdyum, phirjum	phirdem	phirdem
guglipe(n)/guglipa guglibe(n)/gugliba	guglipe(n)/guglipa guglibe(n)/gugliba	guglimos
pani khoni kuni	pai, payi khoi, khoyi kui, kuyi	pai, payi khoi, khoyi kui, kuyi
ćhib	shib	shib
jeno	zheno	zheno
po	po/mai	mai

The first stratum includes the oldest dialects: Mechkari, Kabuji, Xanduri, Drindari, Erli, Arli, Bugurji, Mahajeri, Ursari (Rićhinari), Spoitori (Xoraxane), Karpatichi, Polska Roma, Kaale (from Finland), Sinto-manush, and the so-called Baltic dialects.

In the second there are Chergari, Gurbeti, Jambashi, Fichiri, Filipiji and a subgroup of the Vlax dialects of Romania and Bulgaria.

The third comprises the rest of the so-called Vlax dialects, including Kalderash, Lovari, Machvano.

[edit] Mixed languages

Some Roma have developed creole languages or mixed languages, including:

• Caló or Iberian-Romani, which uses the Romani lexicon and Spanish grammar (the calé).
• Romungro
• Lomavren or Armenian-Romani
• Angloromani or English-Romani
• Scandoromani (Norwegian-Traveller Romani or Swedish-Traveller Romani)
• Romano-Greek or Greek-Romani
• Romano-Serbian or Serbian-Romani
• Boyash, a dialect of Romanian with Hungarian and Romani loanwords
• Sinti-Manouche-Sinti (Romani with German grammar)

[edit] Standardization

Main article: Romani language standardization

There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, the United States, Sweden, and other nations.

A standardized form of Romani is used in Serbia, and in Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina Romani is one of the officially recognized languages of minorities having its own radio stations and news broadcasts.

In Romania, the country with the largest identifiable Roma population, there is a unified teaching system of the Romani language for all dialects spoken in the country. This is primarily a result of the work of Gheorghe Sarău, who made Romani textbooks for teaching Roma children in the Romani language. He teaches a purified, mildly prescriptive language, choosing the original Indo-Aryan words and grammatical elements from various dialects. The pronunciation is mostly like that of the dialects from the first stratum. When there are more variants in the dialects, the variant that most closely resembles the oldest forms is chosen, like byav instead of abyav, abyau, akana instead of akanak, shunav instead of ashunav or ashunau, etc.

An effort is also made to derive new words from the vocabulary already in use, i.e., xuryavno (airplane), vortorin (slide rule), palpaledikhipnasko (retrospectively), pashnavni (adjective). There is an ever-changing set of borrowings from Romanian as well, including such terms as vremea (weather, time), primariya (town hall), frishka (cream), sfïnto (saint, holy). Neologisms taken from Hindi include bijli (bulb, electricity), misal (example), chitro (drawing, design), lekhipen (writing) and from English (printisarel, prezidento).

Language standardization is presently also being employed in the revival of the Romani language among various groups (in Spain, Great Britain, and elsewhere), which have ceased to speak the language. In these cases, a specific dialect is not revived, but rather a standardized form derived from many dialects is learned.

[edit] Romani loanwords in English

Romani has lent many words to English, including posh, pal, dukes^{[citation needed]} (meaning fists, as in the expression "put up your dukes"), and lollipop^{[citation needed]}. These mostly turn up in slang—such as gadgie (man), shiv or chiv (knife), cushty or cooshtie (good) — and in regional dialects, such as radge (adj bad or angry, noun a state of irritation) in northeast England and southeast Scotland and jougal (dog) in southeast Scotland and parni (water) and bewer (woman) in West Yorkshire in England, also seen as beor in Corkonian slang within Hiberno-English. Urban British slang shows an increasing level of Romani influence, with some words becoming accepted into the lexicon of standard English (for example, chav from an assumed Anglo-Romani word, possibly charvy meaning either "baby" or "mate" depending on context, chavi meaning male child or charver meaning prostitute).

[edit] Distribution

Distribution of Romani speakers in Europe according to Bakker et al. (2000) [4]. Percentage (%) shows the percentage of Romani speaking Roma population in each country.

Country	Speakers	%
Albania	90,000	95%
Austria	20,000	80%
Belarus	27,000	95%
Belgium	10,000	80%
Bosnia and Herzegovina	40,000	90%
Bulgaria	350,000	80%
Croatia	28,000	80%
Czech Republic	140,000	50%
Denmark	1,500	90%
Estonia	1,100	90%
Finland	3,000	90%
France	215,000	70%
Germany	85,000	70%
Greece	160,000	90%
Hungary	260,000	50%
Italy	42,000	90%
Latvia	18,500	90%
Lithuania	4,000	90%
Macedonia	215,000	90%
Moldova	56,000	90%
Netherlands	3,000	90%
Poland	4,000	90%
Romania	433,000	80%
Russia	405,000	80%
Serbia and Montenegro	380,000	90%
Slovakia	300,000	60%
Slovenia	8,000	90%
Spain	1,000	1%
Sweden	9,500	90%
Turkey	280,000	70%
Ukraine	113,000	90%
United Kingdom	1,000	0.5%

[edit] See also

• Romani writing systems
• Caló, or Ibero-Romani.
• Romano-Serbian language
• Bohemian Romani
• Angloromani language
• Baltic Romani language
• Domari language
• Lomavren language
• North Central Romani
• Tarish language
• Vlax Romani language
• Welsh Romani language

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

(Note: For links to a variety of Romani media, chatroom and history and culture sites, see in particular the links pages of the Manchester University Romani project.)

• A discussion about standardization
• Detailed discussion of the language
• Gelem gelem - International Roma anthem: text, translation and sound recordings
• Lord's Prayer in Vlach Romani
• Outline of Romani Grammar (Victor A. Friedman)
• Partial Romani/English Dictionary (Compiled by Angela Ba'Tal Libal and Will Strain)
• Roma / Gypsies: Language (The World Wide Web Virtual Library)
• Romacilikanes - The Romani dialect of Parakalamos (Y. Matras)
• Romani (Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics article, by Y. Matras)
• Romani Archive and Documentation Center
• Romani in Europe
• Romani language tree
• Romani Lila - online catalogue of about 15,000 books, articles etc. on Roma and Romani
• Romani Origins - Veda encyclopedia
• Romani page by Fergus Smith
• Romani project at Karl-Franzens-University in Graz
• Romani project at Manchester University
• Romano-Kalo grammar (parts, in Spanish) by Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia: A Propósito de Nuestro Idioma / Gramática Gitano (4) / Gramática Gitano (5)
• The classification of Romani dialects: A geographic-historical perspective (Y. Matras)
• The future of Romani: Toward a policy of linguistic pluralism (also here) (Y. Matras)
• Learn Romani
• The Rroma - contains language information
• The status of Romani in Europe - Report submitted to the Council of Europe’s Language Policy Division, October 2005 (Yaron Matras)
• Vikipidiya - Romani language Wikipedia

v • d • e Indo-Iranian languages
Indic (Indo-Aryan)	Sanskrit: Vedic Sanskrit - Classical Sanskrit · Prakrit: Pāli - Magadhi · Mitanni · Bengali (Dialects: Chittagonian, Sylheti) · Hindustani (Registers: Hindi, Urdu) · Angika · Assamese · Bhojpuri · Bishnupriya Manipuri · Dhivehi · Dogri · Gujarati · Konkani · Mahl · Maithili · Marathi · Nepali · Oriya · Punjabi · Romani · Sindhi · Sinhala
Iranian	Eastern: Avestan · Bactrian · Pamir (Shughni, Sarikoli, Wakhi) · Pashto · Scythian - Ossetic · Sogdian - Yaghnobi · Western: Persian: Old Persian - Middle Persian (Pahlavi) - Modern Persian (Varieties: Farsi, Dari, Tajik) · Bukhori · Balochi · Dari (Zoroastrianism) · Gilaki · Kurdish · Luri · Mazandarani · Talysh · Tat · Zazaki
Dardic	Dameli · Domaaki · Gawar-Bati · Kalash · Kashmiri · Khowar · Kohistani · Nangalami · Pashayi · Palula · Shina · Shumashti
Nuristani	Askunu · Kamkata-viri · Tregami · Vasi-vari · Waigali

	The Roma minority in Romania
Organisations	National Agency for the Roma | Aven Amentza | Romani CRISS | Resource Center for Roma Communities | Romanothan
Initiatives	Decade of Roma Inclusion | National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust | Racism Breaks the Game
People	Mădălin Voicu | Ion Voicu | Nicolae Păun | Gheorghe Răducanu | Taraful Haiducilor | Fanfare Ciocărlia
Demographics	List of towns in Romania by Roma population
Culture	Romani language | Kalderash | Boyash | Ursari | Lăutari | International Romani Art Festival
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