Romani language standardization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the Romani language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, the USA, and Sweden. A standardized form of Romani is used in Serbia. In Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina, Romani is one of the officially recognized minority languages—having its own radio stations and news broadcasts. In Romania, the country with the largest identifiable Roma population, there is a unified system for teaching 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. His Romani is a purified, mildly prescriptive language, choosing the original Indo-Aryan words and grammatical elements chosen from various dialects. The pronunciation is most similar to 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. For example, 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 being pursued 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 developed.
Despite various standardization efforts, the overall trend in Romani literacy is towards regional codification, with some degree of international orientation, in the choice of some graphemes as well as vocabulary. This international orientation allows Romani readers to appreciate texts composed in other countries. At the same time, this pluralistic approach to codification is representative of the dispersion of Romani communities, and the lack of a central government authority. 'Linguistic pluralism' of this kind has been embraced as a policy by the European Roma and Traveller Forum (the elected Roma representation at the Council of Europe) in a statementon its website. It has also received the support of various leading linguists investigating Romani, such as the late Milena Hübschmannová, Dieter W. Halwachs, and Yaron Matras. The RomLex online Romani dictionary acknowledges pluralism by incorporating dialect variants, albeit in a consistent and unified spelling system.
