Romani people
Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language, an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the "Ciganos" of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló, Angloromany, and Scandoromani. Most of the speaker communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.
Romani language
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.