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]  Denmark[5]  Finland[7]  Germany[8]  Hungary[9]  Kosovo[10]  Montenegro[5]  North Macedonia[5]  Norway[11]  Poland[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.