Romani ( ; Romanes ;"Romanes" in Collins English Dictionary; "Romanes" in Dictionary.com. or Romany; ) is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani people. Most Roma speak one of its dialects.Its largest dialects are Balkan Romani (about 600,000 speakers), Vlax Romani (500,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak mixed languages based on the surrounding language with some Romani-derived vocabulary; these are known as Para-Romani varieties rather than Romani dialects. "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."
These dialects typically incorporate loanwords and calques from national languages, especially for terms that Romani lacks. Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the of Spain, the Romanichal of Great Britain, and the Romanisael of Sweden and Norway speak the mixed languages Caló, Angloromani and Scandoromani, respectively. Most Romani language-speaking communities there consist of later immigrants.
Assuming 3.5 million speakers in Europe, makes Romani the second-largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan.
Romani speakers are bilingual, accustomed to borrowing words or phrases from a second language; this makes it difficult for Roma to communicate across national borders. No tradition or standard guides Romani language use.
Name Speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as "the Romani language" or (adverb) "in a Rom way". This derives from the Romani word , meaning either "a member of the (Romani) group" or "husband". This is also the origin of the term "Roma" in English, although some Romani groups refer to themselves using other demonyms (e.g. 'Kaale', 'Sinti').
Classification In the 18th century, it was shown by comparative studies that Romani belongs to the Indo-European language family.Šebková, Hana; Žlnayová, Edita (1998). Nástin mluvnice slovenské romštiny (pro pedagogické účely) . Ústí nad Labem: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity J. E. Purkyně v Ústí nad Labem. . In 1763 István Vályi, a Calvinist pastor from Satu Mare in Transylvania, was the first to notice the similarity between Romani and Indo-Aryan languages by comparing the Romani dialect of Győr with the language (perhaps Sinhala) spoken by three Sri Lankan students he met in the Netherlands.Marcel Courthiade, “Appendix Two. Kannauʒ on the Ganges, cradle of the Rromani people”, in Donald Kenrick, Gypsies: from the Ganges to the Thames. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004, p. 105. This was followed by the linguist Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger (1751–1822) whose book (1782) posited that 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 never published his findings, but they may have influenced or laid the groundwork for later linguists, especially August Pott and his pioneering (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. 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. Romani is the only Indo-Aryan language, other than Domari, to be 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 Persian, Armenian and Byzantine Greek. South Slavic influence is also notable, but is principally limited to grammar and phonology. Balkan Romani has been significantly influenced by Turkish.
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 isoglosses are the shift of Old Indo-Aryan r̥ to u or i (Sanskrit , Romani 'to hear') and kṣ- to kh (Sanskrit , Romani 'eye'). However, unlike other Central Zone languages, Romani preserves many dental clusters (Romani 'three', 'brother', compare Hindi , ). 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 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 ( 'done' + 'me' → 'I did') is also found in languages such as Kashmiri and Shina. 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 word order, and the adoption of a preposed definite article. Early Romani also borrowed from Armenian and Persian.
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.. "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 'man.OBL', 'men.OBL'), and both show agglutination of secondary (Layer II) case endings (Domari '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.
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. Note that the Romani numerals 7 through 9 have been borrowed from Greek.
RomaniDomariLomavrenSanskritHindiOdiaSinhala1ekh, jekhyikayak, yekékaēkēkåeka2dujdīluidvádōduideka3trintærəntərintrítīntinithuna/thri4štarštarišdörcatvā́raḥcārcārihathara/sathara5pandžpandžpendžpáñcapā̃cpāñcåpaha6šovšaššešṣáṭchaḥchååhaya/saya 7iftaxauthaftsaptásātsātåhata/satha8oxtoxaišthaštaṣṭáāṭhāṭhåata9injananunávanaunåånawaya10dešdeslas dáśadasdåśådahaya20bišwīsvistviṃśatíbīskōṛiēwissa100šelsajsajśatasausåhēsiiya/shathakaya
History
The first attestation of Romani is from 1542 AD in western Europe. The earlier history of the Romani language is completely undocumented, and is understood primarily through comparative linguistic evidence.
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 1000 AD.
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 () in the Prakrit became the feminine () in Hindi and 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.