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Romani ( ;
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "Romany" in Oxford Living Dictionaries "Romany" in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary "Romany" in Cambridge Advanced Learner's DictionaryLaurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh also Romanes , "Romanes" in Collins English Dictionary; "Romanes" in Dictionary.com. Romany, Roma; ) is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani people. The largest Romani dialects are Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak based on the surrounding language with retained Romani-derived vocabulary – these are known by linguists as Para-Romani varieties, rather than dialects of the Romani language itself. "In some regions of Europe, especially the western margins (Britain, the Iberian peninsula, Scandinavia), Romani-speaking communities have given up their language in favor of the majority language, but have retained Romani-derived vocabulary as an in-group code. Such codes, for instance Angloromani (Britain), Caló (Spain), or Rommani (Scandinavia) are usually referred to as Para-Romani varieties."
The differences between the various varieties can be as large as, for example, the differences between the Slavic languages.
Romani is an Indo-Aryan language that is part of the Balkan sprachbund. It is the only New Indo-Aryan spoken exclusively outside the Indian subcontinent.Schrammel, Barbara; Halwachs, Dieter W. (2005). "Introduction". General and Applied Romani Linguistics - Proceeding from the 6th International Conference on Romani Linguistics (München: LINCOM): p. 1. .
The Romani language has considerable influence from Middle Persian, Classical Armenian and Byzantine Greek. South Slavic influence is also notable, but is principally limited to grammar and phonology.
Romani is sometimes classified in the Central Zone or Northwestern Zone Indo-Aryan languages, and sometimes treated as a group of its own. Romani shares a number of features with the Central Zone languages. The most significant are the shift of Old Indo-Aryan r̥ to u or i (Sanskrit śr̥ṇ-, Romani šun- 'to hear') and kṣ- to kh (Sanskrit akṣi, Romani j-akh 'eye'). However, unlike other Central Zone languages, Romani preserves many dental clusters (Romani trin 'three', phral 'brother', compare Hindi tīn, bhāi). This implies that Romani split from the Central Zone languages before the Middle Indo-Aryan period. However, Romani shows some features of New Indo-Aryan, such as erosion of the original nominal case system towards a nominative/oblique dichotomy, with new grammaticalized case suffixes added on. This means that the Romani exodus from India could not have happened until late in the first millennium.
Many words are similar to the Marwari language and Lambadi languages spoken in large parts of India. Romani also shows some similarity to the Northwestern Zone languages. In particular, the grammaticalization of enclitic pronouns as person markers on verbs ( kerdo 'done' + me 'me' → kerdjom 'I did') is also found in languages such as Kashmiri and Shina language. This evidences a northwest migration during the split from the Central Zone languages consistent with a later migration to Europe.
Based on these data, Yaron Matras views Romani as "kind of Indian hybrid: a central Indic dialect that had undergone partial convergence with northern Indic languages."
In terms of its grammatical structures, Romani is conservative in maintaining almost intact the Middle Indo-Aryan present-tense person concord markers, and in maintaining consonantal endings for nominal case – both features that have been eroded in most other modern Indo-Aryan languages.
Romani shows a number of phonetic changes that distinguish it from other Indo-Aryan languages – in particular, the devoicing of voiced aspirates ( bh dh gh > ph th kh), shift of medial t d to l, of short a to e, initial kh to x, rhoticization of retroflex ḍ, ṭ, ḍḍ, ṭṭ, ḍh etc. to r and ř, and shift of inflectional -a to -o.
After leaving the Indian subcontinent, Romani was heavily affected by contact with European languages. The most significant of these was Medieval Greek, which contributed lexically, phonemically, and grammatically to Early Romani (10th–13th centuries). This includes inflectional affixes for nouns, and verbs that are still productive with borrowed vocabulary, the shift to VO language, and the adoption of a preposed definite article. Early Romani also borrowed from Armenian and Persian language.
Romani and Domari language share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.. "Striking nonetheless are the grammatical similarities between Romani and Domari: the synthetisation of Layer ii affixes, the emergence of new concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.". "The morphology of the two languages is similar in other respects: Both retain the old present conjugation in the verb (Domari kar-ami 'I do'), and consonantal endings of the oblique nominal case (Domari mans-as 'man.OBL', mans-an 'men.OBL'), and both show agglutination of secondary (Layer II) case endings (Domari mans-as-ka 'for the man'). It had therefore been assumed that Romani and Domari derived form the same ancestor idiom, and split only after leaving the Indian subcontinent." This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent, but more recent research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central Zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.
Linguistic evaluation carried out in the nineteenth century by Pott (1845) and Miklosich (1882–1888) showed the Romani language to be a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), establishing that the ancestors of the Romani could not have left India significantly earlier than AD 1000.
The principal argument favouring a migration during or after the transition period to NIA is the loss of the old system of nominal case, and its reduction to just a two-way case system, nominative vs. oblique. A secondary argument concerns the system of gender differentiation. Romani has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Middle Indo-Aryan languages (named MIA) generally had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and some modern Indo-Aryan languages retain this old system even today.
It is argued that loss of the neuter gender did not occur until the transition to NIA. 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 jag in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages have been cited as evidence that the forerunner of Romani remained on the Indian subcontinent until a later period, perhaps even as late as the tenth century.
There is no historical proof to clarify who the ancestors of the Romani were or what motivated them to emigrate from the Indian subcontinent, but there are various theories. The influence of Greek language, and to a lesser extent of Armenian and the Iranian languages (like Persian language and Kurdish) points to a prolonged stay in Anatolia, Armenian highlands/Caucasus after the departure from South Asia. The latest territory where Romani is thought to have been spoken as a mostly unitary linguistic variety is the Byzantine Empire, between the 10th and the 13th centuries. The language of this period, which can be reconstructed on the basis of modern-day dialects, is referred to as Early Romani or Late Proto-Romani.
The Mongol invasion of Europe beginning in the first half of the thirteenth century triggered another westward migration. The Romani 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. A project at Manchester University in England is transcribing Romani dialects, many of which are on the brink of extinction, for the first time.
Dialect differentiation began with the dispersal of the Romani from the Balkans around the 14th century and on, and with their settlement in areas across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The two most significant areas of divergence are the southeast (with epicenter of the northern Balkans) and west-central Europe (with epicenter Germany). The central dialects replace s in grammatical paradigms with h. The northwestern dialects append j-, simplify ndř to r, retain n in the nominalizer -ipen / -iben, and lose adjectival past-tense in intransitives ( gelo, geli → geljas 'he/she went'). Other isoglosses (esp. demonstratives, 2/3pl perfective concord markers, loan verb markers) motivate the division into Balkan, Vlax, Central, Northeast, and Northwest dialects.
Matras (2002, 2005) has argued for a theory of geographical classification of Romani dialects, which is based on the diffusion in space of innovations. According to this theory, Early Romani (as spoken in the Byzantine Empire) was brought to western and other parts of Europe through population migrations of Rom in the 14th–15th centuries. These groups settled in the various European regions during the 16th and 17th centuries, acquiring fluency in a variety of contact languages. Changes emerged then, which spread in wave-like patterns, creating the dialect differences attested today. According to Matras, there were two major centres of innovations: some changes emerged in western Europe (Germany and vicinity), spreading eastwards; other emerged in the Wallachian area, spreading to the west and south. In addition, many regional and local isoglosses formed, creating a complex wave of language boundaries. Matras points to the prothesis of j- in aro > jaro 'egg' and ov > jov 'he' as typical examples of west-to-east diffusion, and of addition of prothetic a- in bijav > abijav as a typical east-to-west spread. His conclusion is that dialect differences formed in situ, and not as a result of different waves of migration.Norbert Boretzky: Kommentierter Dialektatlas des Romani. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004 p. 18–26
According to this classification, the dialects are split as follows:
SIL Ethnologue has the following classification:
In a series of articles (beginning in 1982) linguist Marcel Courthiade proposed a different kind of 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 of Great Britain) those with only a Romani vocabulary grafted into a non-Romani language (normally referred to as Para-Romani).
A table of some dialectal differences:
| 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: Mećkari (of Tirana), Kabuʒi (of Korça), Xanduri, Drindari, Erli, Arli, Bugurji, Mahaʒeri (of Pristina), Ursari ( Rićhinari), Spoitori ( Xoraxane), Karpatichi, Polska Roma, Kaale (from Finland), Sinto-manush, and the so-called Baltic countries dialects.
In the second there are Ćergari (of Podgorica), Gurbeti, Jambashi, Fichiri, Filipiʒi (of Agia Varvara)
The third comprises the rest of the Romani dialects, including Kalderash, Lovari, Machvano.
The most concentrated areas of Romani speakers are found in the Balkans and central Europe, particularly in Romania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Slovakia. Although there are no reliable figures for the exact number of Romani speakers, the estimated amount of Romani speakers in the European Union is around 3.5 million, this makes it the largest spoken minority language in the European Union.
| +L1 Romani speakers by country !Country !Romani Speakers !% !Year !Ref | ||||
| 4,025 | 0.14 | 2011 | ||
| 5,766 | 0.16 | 2013 | ||
| 227,974 | 3.90 | 2021 | ||
| 15,269 | 0.40 | 2021 | ||
| 28,102 | 0.27 | 2022 | ||
| 23,192 | 0.28 | 2022 | ||
| 5,597 | 0.35 | 2024 | ||
| 1,973 | 0.07 | 2021 | ||
| 7,574 | 0.28 | 2014 | ||
| 4,658 | 0.76 | 2021 | ||
| 31,721 | 1.86 | 2021 | ||
| 7,284 | 0.02 | 2021 | ||
| 199,050 | 1.20 | 2021 | ||
| 141,785 | 0.11 | 2021 | ||
| 79,687 | 1.27 | 2022 | Excluding Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, which is under the de facto control of Kosovo since 2008. | |
| 100,526 | 1.96 | 2021 |
Portions and selections of the Bible have been translated to many different forms of the Romani language. The entire Bible has been translated to Kalderash Romani.E.g.
Attempts to publish in Romani were undertaken in the interwar Soviet Union (using the Cyrillic script) and in socialist Yugoslavia.Kamusella, T. Language in Central Europe's History and Politics: From the Rule of cuius regio, eius religio to the National Principle of cuius regio, eius lingua? Journal of Globalization Studies. Volume 2, Number 1, May 2011 [8]
Some traditional communities have expressed opposition to codifying Romani or having it used in public functions. However, the mainstream trend has been towards standardization.
Different variants of the language are now in the process of being codified in those countries with high Romani populations (for example, Slovakia). There are also some attempts currently aimed at the creation of a unified standard language.
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, a country with a sizable Romani minority (3.3% of the total 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 Romani children in the Romani language. Children's literature 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). Hindi-based include bijli (bulb, electricity), misal (example), chitro (drawing, design), lekhipen (writing), while there are also English language-based neologisms, like printisarel < "to print".
Romani is now used on the internet, in some local media, and in some countries as a medium of instruction.
In 2024, Romani was added to Google Translate.
The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography.
The proposals to form a unified Romani alphabet and one standard Romani language by either choosing one dialect as a standard, or by merging more dialects together, have not been successful - instead, the trend is towards a model where each dialect has its own writing system. Among native speakers, the most common pattern is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary and so on.
To demonstrate the differences, the phrase /romani tʃʰib/, which means "Romani language" in all the dialects, can be written as románi csib, románi čib, romani tschib, románi tschiwi, romani tšiw, romeni tšiv, romanitschub, rromani čhib, romani chib, rhomani chib, romaji šjib and so on.
A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English- and Czech-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.
Loans from contact languages often allow other non-native phonemes.
| + Consonants ! colspan="2" | ! Labial consonant
!colspan=2 Alveolar
! Post- alveolar !(Alveolo-) palatal ! Velar consonant ! Uvular consonant ! Glottal |
Eastern and Southeastern European Romani dialects commonly have palatalized consonants , either distinctive or allophonic.
In some varieties such as Slovak Romani, at the end of a word, voiced consonants become voiceless and aspirated ones lose aspiration. Some examples:
| gad | gada |
| ačh! | ačhel |
| + Vowels ! ! Front vowel ! Central vowel ! Back vowel |
Vowel length is often distinctive in Western European Romani dialects.
| pani | Sanskrit (), compare Hindi (), Nepali (पानी) | |
| manro | Sanskrit (मण्डक) , compare Sindhi (مَانِي), Newari (मरि) | |
| tato | Sanskrit tapta (), compare Rajasthani (तातो), Nepali (), Bhojpuri (तातल) | |
| ladž | Sanskrit (), compare Assamese () | |
| jakh | Sanskrit (), compare Gujarati (), Nepali () | |
| čhuri | Sanskrit (क्षुरी), compare Hindi (छुरी) | |
| thud | Sanskrit (), compare Hindi (दूध) | |
| kham | Sanskrit () , cognate with Persian (گرم); compare Bhojpuri, Haryanvi (घाम) | |
| phuv | Sanskrit (), compare Hindi (), Assamese () | |
| pučhel | Sanskrit (), compare Hindi (पुँछ) | |
| avgin | Persian () | |
| mol | Persian (), compare Urdu () | |
| ambrol | Persian () | |
| čerxaj | Persian () | |
| zumavel | , | Persian () |
| rez | Persian (رز) | |
| vordon / verdo | Ossetian (уæрдон) | |
| grast / graj (north) | Armenian () ; compare Bengali ghora () | |
| morthi | Armenian () | |
| ćekat / ćikat | Armenian () | |
| xumer | Armenian () | |
| pativ | Armenian () | |
| khilǎv | Georgian () | |
| camla | Georgian () | |
| khoni | Kartvelian, for example Georgian () | |
| camcali | Georgian () | |
| drom | Greek () | |
| stǎdi | Greek (σκιάδι) | |
| xoli / xolǐn | , | Greek () |
| zervo | Greek (ζερβός) | |
| xinel | Greek () | |
| puška | Slavic () | |
| praxos | , | Slavic prach / prah () |
| ulica | Slavic () | |
| košnica | Bulgarian () | |
| guruša (north) | Polish | |
| kaxni / khanǐ | Czech | |
| raca | Romanian , compare Slovene | |
| mačka | Slavic | |
| mangin / mandǐn | Turkish mangır , through a Tatar language dialect. | |
| bèrga (North) | German | |
| niglo (Sinti) | German , compare Assamese nigoni () | |
| gàjza (Sinti) | Alemannic German | |
The indefinite article is often borrowed from the local contact language.
Examples:
The ending of borrowed masculine is -os, -is, -as, -us, and the borrowed feminine ends in -a.
All nominals can be singular or plural.
The vocative and nominative are a bit "outside" of the case systemŠebková, Žlnayová 1998, p. 52–54 as they are produced only by adding a suffix to the root.
Example: the suffix for singular masculine vocative of ikeoclitic types is -eja.Šebková, Žlnayová 1998, p. 47
The oblique cases disregard gender or type: -te / -de (locative), -ke / -ge (dative), -tar/-dar (ablative), -sa(r) (instrumental and comitative), and -ker- / -ger- (genitive).
Example: The endings for o/i ending nominals are as follows:
Example: the suffix for indirect root for masculine plural for all inherited words is -en, the dative suffix is -ke.Šebková, Žlnayová 1998, p. 76–78
There are many of nouns that decline differently, and show dialectal variation.
Parts of speech such as adjectives and the article, when they function as attributes before a word, distinguish only between a nominative and an indirect/oblique case form.Šebková, Žlnayová 1998, p. 52 In the Early Romani system that most varieties preserve, declinable adjectives had nominative endings similar to the nouns ending in -o (masculine -o, feminine -i) but the oblique endings -e in the masculine, -a in the feminine. The ending -e was the same regardless of gender. So-called athematic adjectives had the nominative forms -o in the masculine and the feminine and -a in the plural; the oblique has the same endings as the previous group, but the preceding stem changes by adding the element -on-.
Example:
Adjectives and the definite article show agreement with the noun they modify.
Example:
The core of the verb is the lexical root, verb morphology is suffixed.
The verb stem (including derivation markers) by itself has non-perfective aspect and is present or subjunctive.
The first class, called I., has a suffix -el in 3rd person singular.
Examples, in 3 ps. sg:
Examples, in 3 ps. sg:
Examples:
Romani tenses are, not exclusively, present tense, future tense, two past tenses (perfect and imperfect), present or past conditional and present imperative.
Depending on the dialect, the suffix -a marks the present, future, or conditional. There are many perfective suffixes, which are determined by root phonology, valency, and semantics: e.g. ker-d- 'did'.
There are two sets of personal conjugation suffixes, one for non-perfective verbs, and another for perfective verbs. The non-perfective personal suffixes, continued from Middle Indo-Aryan, are as follows:
| + Non-perfective personal suffixes ! ! 1 ! 2 ! 3 |
These are slightly different for consonant- and vowel-final roots (e.g. xa-s 'you eat', kam-es 'you want').
The perfective suffixes, deriving from late Middle Indo-Aryan enclitic pronouns, are as follows:
| + Perfective personal suffixes ! ! 1 ! 2 ! 3 |
Verbs may also take a further remoteness suffix whose original form must have been -as(i) and which is preserved in different varieties as -as, -ahi, -ys or -s. With non-perfective verbs this marks the imperfect, habitual, or conditional. With the perfective, this marks the pluperfect or counterfactual.
Various tenses of the same word, all in 2nd person singular.
Various tenses of the word te chal, all in 2nd person singular.
Various tenses of the same word, all in 2nd person singular again.
Romani makes use of valency-changing morphology which increases or decreases the valency of its verbs.
Šebková and Žlnayová, while describing Slovak Romani, argues that Romani is a free word order language and that it allows for theme-rheme structure, similarly to Czech, and that in some Romani dialects in East Slovakia, there is a tendency to put a verb at the end of a sentence.
However, Matras describes it further. According to Matras, in most dialects of Romani, Romani is a VO language, with SVO order in contrastive sentences and VSO order in thetic sentences. The tendency of some dialects to put the verb in final position may be due to Slavic influence.
Examples, from Slovak Romani:
Clauses are usually finite clause. relative clauses, introduced by the relativizer kaj, are postponed. Factual and non-factual complex clauses are distinguished.
Occasionally loanwords from other Indo-Iranian languages, such as Hindi language, are mistakenly labelled as Romani due to surface similarities (due to a shared root), such as cushy, which is from Urdu (itself a loan from Persian language xuš) meaning "excellent, healthy, happy".
See also
Citations
General and cited sources
Further reading
External links
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