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.
Origin of the Romanians
One of the first scholars who systematically studied the Romance languages, Friedrich Christian Diez, described Romanian as a semi-Romance language in the 1830s. In 2009, Kim Schulte likewise argued that "Romanian is a language with a hybrid vocabulary". The proportion of loanwords in Romanian is indeed higher than in other Romance languages. Its certain structural featuressuch as the construction of the future tensealso distinguish Romanian from other Romance languages. The same peculiarities connect it to Albanian, Bulgarian and other tongues spoken in the Balkan Peninsula. Nevertheless, as linguist Graham Mallinson emphasizes, Romanian "retains enough of its Latin heritage at all linguistic levels to qualify for membership of the Romance family in its own right", even without taking into account the "re-Romancing tendency" during its recent history.