Romani language
Romani (; also Romany; ) is any of several languages of the Romani people belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. 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), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). 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.
Romance languages
"au" merged with "ō" in the popular speech of Rome already by the 1st century . A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e.g. Cicero's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from "Claudius" to ingratiate himself with the masses. This change never penetrated far from Rome, however, and the pronunciation /au/ was maintained for centuries in the vast majority of Latin-speaking areas, although it eventually developed into some variety of "o" in many languages. For example, Italian and French have as the usual reflex, but this post-dates diphthongization of and the French-specific palatalization > (hence "causa" > French "chose", Italian "cosa" not **"cuosa"). Spanish has , but Portuguese spelling maintains , which has developed to (and still remains as in some dialects, and in others). Occitan, Romanian, southern Italian languages, and many other minority Romance languages still have . A few common words, however, show an early merger with "ō" , evidently reflecting a generalization of the popular Roman pronunciation: e.g. French "queue", Italian "coda" , Occitan "co(d)a", Romanian "coadă" (all meaning "tail") must all derive from "cōda" rather than Classical "cauda" (but notice Portuguese "cauda"). Similarly, Portuguese "orelha", French "oreille", Romanian "ureche", and Sardinian "olícra", "orícla" "ear" must derive from "ōric(u)la" rather than Classical "auris" (Occitan "aurelha" was probably influenced by the unrelated "ausir" < "audīre" "to hear"), and the form "oricla" is in fact reflected in the Appendix Probi.