Romani
Romany Romanes Roma
rromani ćhib
Ethnicity	Romani
Native speakers	4.6 million (2015)[1][2]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Western Indo-Aryan[3] Romani
Dialects	Balkan Romani (including Zargari Romani) Baltic Romani Carpathian Romani Northern Romani (including Finnish Kalo, Sinte Romani, Welsh Romani) Vlax Romani
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Austria[4]  Bosnia and Herzegovina[5]  Colombia[6]  Finland[7]  Germany[8]  Hungary[9]  Kosovo[10]  Montenegro[5]  North Macedonia[5]  Norway[11]  Poland[5]  Denmark[5]  Romania[5]  Serbia[5]  Slovakia[5]  Sweden[5]
Language codes
ISO 639-2	rom
ISO 639-3	rom – inclusive code Individual codes: rmn – Balkan Romani rml – Baltic Romani rmc – Carpathian Romani rmf – Finnish Kalo rmo – Sinte Romani rmy – Vlax Romani rmw – Welsh Romani
Glottolog	roma1329
Romani is classified as Vulnerable by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010)
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

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Romani (/ˈrɒməni, ˈroʊ-/ ROM-ə-nee, ROH-;^{[12][13][14][15]} also Romany, Romanes /ˈrɒmənɪs/ ROM-ən-iss,^[16] Roma; Romani: rromani ćhib) is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani communities.^[17] According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers),^[18] Balkan Romani (600,000),^[19] and Sinte Romani (300,000).^[20] Some Romani communities speak mixed languages 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.^[21]

The differences between the various varieties can be as large as, for example, the differences between the Slavic languages.^[22]

Name

Speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as rromani ćhib "the Romani language" or rromanes (adverb) "in a Rom way". This derives from the Romani word rrom, meaning either "a member of the (Romani) group" or "husband". This is also the origin of the term "Roma" in English, although some Roma groups refer to themselves using other demonyms (e.g. 'Kaale', 'Sinti').^[23]

Classification

In the 18th century, it was shown by comparative studies that Romani belongs to the Indo-European language family.^[24] In 1763 Vályi István, a Calvinist pastor from Satu Mare in Transylvania, was the first to notice the similarity between Romani and Indo-Aryan by comparing the Romani dialect of Győr with the language (perhaps Sinhala) spoken by three Sri Lankan students he met in the Netherlands.^[25] This was followed by the linguist Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger (1751–1822) whose book Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien (1782) posited Romani was descended from Sanskrit. This prompted the philosopher Christian Jakob Kraus to collect linguistic evidence by systematically interviewing the Roma in Königsberg prison. Kraus's findings were never published, but they may have influenced or laid the groundwork for later linguists, especially August Pott and his pioneering Darstellung der Zigeuner in Europa und Asien (1844–45). By the mid-nineteenth century the linguist and author George Borrow was able to state categorically his findings that it was a language with its origins in India, and he later published a glossary, Romano Lavo-lil.^[26] Research into the way the Romani dialects branched out was started in 1872 by the Slavicist Franz Miklosich in a series of essays. However, it was the philologist Ralph Turner's 1927 article “The Position of Romani in Indo-Aryan” that served as the basis for the integration of Romani into the history of Indian 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.^[27]

Romani is sometimes classified in the Central Zone or Northwestern Zone Indo-Aryan languages, and sometimes treated as a group of its own.^[28][29] Romani shares a number of features with the Central Zone languages.^[30] The most significant isoglosses 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').^[30] However, unlike other Central Zone languages, Romani preserves many dental clusters (Romani trin 'three', phral 'brother', compare Hindi tīn, bhāi).^[30] This implies that Romani split from the Central Zone languages before the Middle Indo-Aryan period.^[30] 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.^[30] This means that the Romani exodus from India could not have happened until late in the first millennium.^[30]

Many words are similar to the Marwari and Lambadi languages spoken in large parts of India. Romani also shows some similarity to the Northwestern Zone languages.^[30] 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.^[30] This evidences a northwest migration during the split from the Central Zone languages consistent with a later migration to Europe.^[30]

Based on these data, Yaron Matras^[31] views Romani as "kind of Indian hybrid: a central Indic dialect that had undergone partial convergence with northern Indic languages."^[30]

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.^[30]

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.^[30]

After leaving the Indian subcontinent, Romani was heavily affected by contact with European languages.^[30] The most significant of these was Medieval Greek, which contributed lexically, phonemically, and grammatically to Early Romani (10th–13th centuries).^[30] This includes inflectional affixes for nouns, and verbs that are still productive with borrowed vocabulary, the shift to VO word order, and the adoption of a preposed definite article.^[30] Early Romani also borrowed from Armenian and Persian.^[30]

Romani and Domari 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.^[32][33] 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.^[34][35]

The following table presents the numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with the corresponding terms in Sanskrit, Hindi, Odia, and Sinhala to demonstrate the similarities.^[36] Note that the Romani numerals 7 through 9 have been borrowed from Greek.

History

The first attestation of Romani is from 1542 AD in western Europe.^[30] The earlier history of the Romani language is completely undocumented, and is understood primarily through comparative linguistic evidence.^[30]

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, and to a lesser extent of Armenian and the Iranian languages (like Persian 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.^[37][38]

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.^[39] A project at Manchester University in England is transcribing Romani dialects, many of which are on the brink of extinction, for the first time.^[39]

Dialects

Today's dialects of Romani are differentiated by the vocabulary accumulated since their departure from Anatolia, as well as through divergent phonemic evolution 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.

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.^[40] The two most significant areas of divergence are the southeast (with epicenter of the northern Balkans) and west-central Europe (with epicenter Germany).^[40] The central dialects replace s in grammatical paradigms with h.^[40] 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').^[40] Other isoglosses (esp. demonstratives, 2/3pl perfective concord markers, loan verb markers) motivate the division into Balkan, Vlax, Central, Northeast, and Northwest dialects.^[40]

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.^[41]

According to this classification, the dialects are split as follows:

• Northern Romani dialects in western and northern Europe, southern Italy and the Iberian peninsula^[42]
• Central Romani dialects from southern Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Carpathian Ruthenia and southeastern Austria^[42]
• Balkan Romani dialects, including the Black Sea coast dialects^[42]
• Vlax Romani dialects, chiefly associated with the historical Wallachian and Transylvanian regions, with outmigrants in various regions throughout Europe and beyond^[42]

SIL Ethnologue has the following classification:

In a series of articles (beginning in 1982) 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: