Romany Languages

Romany languages, Romany also spelled Romani, also called řomani čhib (“Romany tongue”), řomanes (“in a Rom way”), or Gypsy (Gipsy), group of 60 or more highly divergent dialects that are genetically related to the Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages. The Romany languages are spoken by more than three million individuals worldwide, and the more remotely related Domari group of dialects (whose speakers seem to have been the ones to have been given the name gypsy, and also Spanish gitano, French gitan, from Greek Aigyptiakós ‘Egyptian’) by another two and a half million throughout North Africa and West Asia. About a million people of Roma heritage are also estimated to live in the United States, and another 800,000 in Brazil.

Linguistic and historical evidence indicates that the ancestral speakers of Romany, the Roma, originated in India and began migrating to other areas in the 9th or 10th century. The speakers of the Domari group are surmised to have migrated to the Arab world a few centuries later—i.e., around the 13th and 14th centuries. Roma communities had been established on every inhabited continent by the second half of the 20th century.

Although it is clear that Romany is a member of the Indo-Aryan group—with the nomadic Banjara community of India the latest group to claim linguistic kinship between Romany and their language, Lamani/Lambadi/Gor-Boli/Banjari—scholarly analysis of the relationships between the Romany languages has been uneven. The 19th-century Slovenian scholar Franz von Miklosich classified Modern Romany into 13 dialect groups, naming each group for the contact language from which it most often borrowed vocabulary, grammar, and phonology: Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Czecho-Slovak (given that the Czech and Slovak speech areas were then recognized as one), German, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Scandinavian, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Welsh, and Spanish. In 1914 and ’15 British scholar Bernard Gilliat-Smith offered an alternative typology in which the dialects were divided into a primary group, Vlax (Vlach or Wallachian), and a secondary group, non-Vlax; the latter consisted of Northern, Central, Balkan, and Iberian subdivisions. At the turn of the 21st century, this categorization was refined by various scholars of historical linguistics, most recently including the British-Roma linguist and activist Ian Hancock and the Romany specialist Yaron Matras, who came to the conclusion that there are five dialect groups of equal rank—Vlax, Balkan, Central, Northeast (Baltic–North Russian), and Northwest (German-Scandinavian)—as well as a number of isolate dialects. The Vlax group is geographically the most widespread as well as numerically the largest.

All Romany dialects have systems of vowels and consonants that are clearly derived from Sanskrit. Some of the changes correspond to those undergone by modern Indian languages; others represent a more archaic state (e.g., the preservation of the initial consonant clusters dr- and tr- and the complex medial cluster st[h]). The vowels typical of the Central dialects are i, e, a, o, u. Indo-Aryan retroflex consonants have disappeared from the consonantal system, while Slavic fricative and affricate sounds have been accepted.

Romany possesses a grammatical system analogous to that of the modern Indic languages. It has two numbers, two genders, three moods, three cases (subject, oblique, and vocative), three persons, and five tenses (present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future, grouped into two aspectual conjugations, the “present” and the “perfective”). Word order is predominantly verb–object (VO), with variation between thetic (continuative) verb–subject (VS) and contrastive subject–verb (SV). The terms Rom, meaning ‘man, husband’ (plural Roma), and Romany are believed to have derived from the Sanskrit doma-.

Perhaps the most unique linguistic feature of Romany is its possession of two grammatical paradigms, each associated with a group of lexical items that share particular origins. The “thematic” or “ikeoclitic” lexicon includes items of central and northwestern Indic origin and adoptions from Persian, Kurdish, Ossetic, Georgian, Armenian, and Byzantine Greek. The “athematic” or “xenoclitic” lexicon includes items from later Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Hungarian, German, and other languages of Europe. The difference is illustrated by comparing the thematic kam-av with the athematic vol-iv, both meaning ‘I love.’

Historically, most Romany speakers have not had ready access to literacy instruction, and some have consciously remained functionally nonliterate (in both Romany and the coexisting non-Romany language) in order to insulate Roma culture from alien influences. Until a few decades ago there was no tradition of writing in Romany, but a rich oral tradition existed. One of the reasons for the survival of the language was held to be its usefulness as an argot or secret language, since Roma lifestyle practices traditionally came to be frowned upon by more-entrenched neighbouring communities, often resulting in their persecution of the “gypsies.” As the Roma people increased their participation in international affairs (e.g., since gaining representation in the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 1979), orthographic and language standardization became the focus of a language-planning commission affiliated with the International Romani Union. Romany has a growing literature (by both Roma and non-Roma writers) and is used in periodicals and in the broadcast media. In the 20th century, in particular, several eastern European countries published poems and folktales in Romany, using their national scripts. Today both Romany and Domari languages are documented online through linguistic description and audio-visual recordings, and certain Web sites and online interest groups are devoted to the concerns of the Roma.