Do the Romani have a specific language?
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.
Romani people
The Romani language is divided into several dialects which together have an estimated number of speakers of more than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as high (several times as high according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.Rom means man or husband in the Romani language. It has the variants dom and lom, related with the Sanskrit words "dam-pati" (lord of the house, husband), "dama" (to subdue), "lom" (hair), "lomaka" (hairy), "loman", "roman" (hairy), "romaça" (man with beard and long hair). Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम "doma" (member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers).
History of the Romani people
Until the mid-to-late 18th century, theories of the origin of the Romani were mostly speculative. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published his research that pointed out the relationship between the Romani language and Hindustani. Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India, with Romani grouping most closely with Sinhalese in a recent study.
Romance languages
To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the same language, which was true until very approximately the second half of the 7th century. However, within two hundred years Latin became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them," i.e. Latin had ceased to be a first language and became a foreign language that had to be learned, if the label Latin is constrained to refer to a state of the language frozen in past time and restricted to linguistic features for the most part typical of higher registers.
Romance languages
Despite being the first Romance language to evolve from Vulgar Latin, Sardinian does not fit well at all into this sort of division. It is clear that Sardinian became linguistically independent from the remainder of the Romance languages at an extremely early date, possibly already by the first century BC. Sardinian contains a large number of archaic features, including total lack of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ and a large amount of vocabulary preserved nowhere else, including some items already archaic by the time of Classical Latin (first century BC). Sardinian has plurals in /s/ but post-vocalic lenition of voiceless consonants is normally limited to the status of an allophonic rule (e.g. [k]"ane" 'dog' but "su" [g]"ane" or "su" [ɣ]"ane" 'the dog'), and there are a few innovations unseen elsewhere, such as a change of /au/ to /a/. Use of "su" < "ipsum" as an article is a retained archaic feature that also exists in the Catalan of the Balearic Islands and that used to be more widespread in Occitano-Romance, and is known as "" (literally the "salted article"), while Sardinian shares delabialization of earlier /kw/ and /gw/ with Romanian: Sard. "abba", Rum. "apă" 'water'; Sard. "limba", Rom. "limbă" 'language' (cf. Italian "acqua", "lingua").
Proto-Romanian language
The Roman occupation led to a Roman-Thracian syncretism, and similar to the case of other conquered civilisation (see Gallo-Roman culture developed in Roman Gaul), had as final result the Latinization of many Thracian tribes which were on the edge of the sphere of Latin influence, eventually resulting in the possible extinction of the Daco-Thracian language (unless, of course, Albanian is its descendant), but traces of it are still preserved in the Eastern Romance substratum. From the 2nd century AD, the Latin spoken in the Danubian provinces starts to display its own distinctive features, separate from the rest of the Romance languages, including those of western Balkans (Dalmatian). The Thraco-Roman period of the Romanian language is usually delimited between the 2nd century (or earlier via cultural influence and economic ties) and the 6th or the 7th century. It is divided, in turn, into two periods, with the division falling roughly in the 3rd to 4th century. The Romanian Academy considers the 5th century as the latest time that the differences between Balkan Latin and western Latin could have appeared, and that between the 5th and 8th centuries, the new language, Romanian, switched from Latin speech, to a vernacular Romance idiom, called Română comună.
Romani language
However, Matras describes it further. According to Matras, in most dialects of Romani, Romani is a VO language, with SVO order in contrastive sentences and verb-subject-object order in thetic sentences. The tendency to put verb on the end in some dialects is the Slavic influence.
Roman language
Roman language may refer to:
Romani language
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.
Romani people
In phonology, Romani language shares a number of isoglosses with the Central branch of Indo-Aryan languages especially in the realization of some sounds of the Old Indo-Aryan. However, it also preserves a number of dental clusters. In regards to verb morphology, Romani follows the exact same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India. Though the retention of dental clusters suggests a break from central languages during the transition from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan, the overall morphology suggests that the language participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages.
Romani language standardization
In Romania, the country with the largest identifiable Romani population, there is now a unified system for teaching the Romani language for all dialects spoken in the country. This is primarily a result of the work of Gheorghe Sarău, who made Romani textbooks for teaching Romani children.
Romance languages
By the 8th century, the situation was very different. During the late 8th century, Charlemagne, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe. Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the Council of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into the "rustica romana lingua", an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin. By this time, and possibly as early as the 6th century according to Price (1984), the Romance lects had split apart enough to be able to speak of separate Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, Italo-Romance and Eastern Romance languages. Some researchers have postulated that the major divergences in the spoken dialects began or accelerated considerably in the 5th century, as the formerly widespread and efficient communication networks of the Western Roman Empire rapidly broke down, leading to the total disappearance of the Western Roman Empire by the end of the century. The critical period between the 5th–10th centuries AD is poorly documented because little or no writing from the chaotic "Dark Ages" of the 5th–8th centuries has survived, and writing after that time was in consciously classicized Medieval Latin, with vernacular writing only beginning in earnest in the 11th or 12th centuries. An exception such as the Oaths of Strasbourg is evidence that by the ninth century effective communication with a non-learnèd audience was carried out in evolved Romance.
Romani people in Germany
More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.
Rhaeto-Romance languages
Rhaeto-Romance, or Rhaetian, is a traditional subfamily of the Romance languages that is spoken in north and north-eastern Italy and in Switzerland. The name "Rhaeto-Romance" refers to the former Roman province of Rhaetia. The linguistic basis of the subfamily is discussed in the so-called Questione Ladina. The Rhaeto-Romance languages form a group of Romance languages in the Alps region of northern Italy and Switzerland. Initially studied by Italian Linguist Graziadio Ascoli in 1873, Ascoli found these languages to share a number of intricacies and believed they belonged to a specific linguistic group. What distinguishes Rhaeto-Romance languages from Italian and other Western languages are its phonemic vowel length (long stressed vowels), consonant formation, and a central rounded vowel series. A few notable examples of these languages are Romansh, Friulian and Ladin, which are officially recognized alongside German, French and Italian, by the Swiss and Italian governments respectively. In total there are about 660,000 speakers of the Rhaeto-Romance languages combined.
Romanian language
The Croatian prelate and diplomat Antun Vrančić recorded in 1570 that ""Vlachs in Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia designate themselves as "Romans"" and the Transylvanian Hungarian Martin Szentiványi in 1699 quotes the following: "«Si noi sentem Rumeni»" ("Și noi suntem români" – "We are Romans as well") and "«Noi sentem di sange Rumena»" ("Noi suntem de sânge român" – "We are of Roman blood"). Notably, Szentiványi used Italian-based spellings to try to write the Romanian words.
Romani alphabets
The Romani language has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although the first example of written Romani dates from 1542, it is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by native Romani people arose.
Sardinia
Sardinian is a distinct branch of the Romance language family: it is therefore a separate language rather than an Italian dialect, and it is also closer to its Latin roots than Italian itself. Sardinian has been formally recognized as one of the twelve historical language minorities of Italy since 1997, by regional and Italian law. The language has been influenced by Catalan, Spanish and recently Italian, while the once spoken Nuragic contributes many features to it in many ancient remnants. In 2006 the regional administration has approved the use of a standardised writing system, the so-called "Limba Sarda Comuna", in official acts. As a literary language, Sardinian is gaining importance, despite heated debate about the lack of a commonly acknowledged standard orthography and controversial proposed solutions to this problem.
Italian language
Italian ("italiano" or ) is a Romance language. Italian, together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to Vulgar Latin of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City and western Istria (in Slovenia and Croatia). It formerly had official status and is still widely spoken in Albania, Malta, Monaco, and in some parts of France (especially Corsica, Nice, Savoie), Greece (Ionian Islands and Dodecanese) and Montenegro (Kotor), as well as in former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa regions where it plays a significant role in various sectors. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. It also has official minority status in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Romania. Many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardized Italian and other regional languages.
Romani people
Because all Romanies use the word "Romani" as an adjective, the term became a noun for the entire ethnic group. Today, the term "Romani" is used by some organizations including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress. However, the Council of Europe and other organizations consider that "Roma" is the correct term referring to all related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend that "Romani" be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.
Italic peoples
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the use of the Latin language retreated in size, but was still widely used, such as through the Catholic Church as well as by others like the Germanic Visigoths and the Catholic Frankish kingdom of Clovis. In part due to regional dialects of the Latin language and local environments, several languages evolved from it, the Romance languages. The ethnic groups that emerged from this development are collectively referred to as Romance peoples or Latin peoples. The Spanish and Portuguese languages prominently spread into North, Central, and South America through colonization. The French language has spread to most inhabited continents through colonialism, however the ethnic qualification of the Italic ethnolinguistic group is only found in France, and some parts of Haiti. The Italian language developed as a national language of Italy beginning in the 19th century out of several similar Romance dialects. The Romanian language has developed primarily in the Daco-Romanian variant that is the national language of Romania and Moldova, but also with other Romanian variants such as the Aromanian spoken in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia by the Aromanian minority.
History of the Romani people
Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the South Asia, 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) Saraiki language group of languages. The Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves from the Indian subcontinent, separated by several centuries.
Romani language
Based on these data, Matras (2006) views Romani as "kind of Indian hybrid: a central Indic dialect that had undergone partial convergence with northern Indic languages."
Romani people in France
More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.
Romani people in Romania
In fact, the Romani people, and the Romani language, have their origin in northern India. The presence of the Roms within the territory of present-day Romania dates back to the 14th century. The population of Roms fluctuated depending on diverse historical and political events.
Romani language
Today's dialects of Romani are differentiated by the vocabulary accumulated since their departure from Anatolia, as well as through divergent phonemic evolution and grammatical features. Many Roma no longer speak the language or speak various new contact languages from the local language with the addition of Romani vocabulary.
Romani language
Speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as ' "the Romani language" or ' "in a Rom way". This derives from the Romani word ', meaning either "a member of the (Romani) group" or "husband". This is also where the term "Roma" derives in English, although some Roma groups refer to themselves using other demonyms (e.g. 'Kaale', 'Sinti', etc.). The English spelling "Rromani language" (with two initial Rs) may also be found, reflecting a different transcription of the Romani phoneme '.
Classification of Romance languages
Romanian, together with other related languages, like Aromanian, has a number of grammatical features which are unique within Romance, but are shared with other non-Romance languages of the Balkans, such as Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. These include, for example, the structure of the vestigial case system, the placement of articles as suffixes of the nouns (' = "sky", ' = "the sky"), and several more. This phenomenon, called the Balkan language area, may be due to contacts between those languages in post-Roman times.
Romani people in Croatia
Three groups of dialects of the Romani language present in the region are Carpathian Romani, Balkan Romani and Vlax Romani language.
Romanian language
Pierre Lescalopier writes in 1574 that those who live in Moldavia, Wallachia and the vast part of Transylvania, ""se consideră adevărați urmași ai romanilor și-și numesc limba "românește", adică romana"" ("they consider themselves as the descendants of the Romans and they name their language Romanian").
Languages of the Roman Empire
Latin and Greek were the official languages of the Roman Empire, but other languages were important regionally. Latin was the original language of the Romans and remained the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period. In the West it became the lingua franca and came to be used for even local administration of the cities including the law courts. After all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire were universally enfranchised in 212 AD, a great number of Roman citizens would have lacked Latin, though they were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, and Latin remained a marker of "Romanness".
Romani language
Historically, Romani was an exclusively unwritten language; for example, Slovakian Romani's orthography was codified only in 1971.
Languages of the Roman Empire
Latin was the language of the Romans from the earliest known period. Writing under the first Roman emperor Augustus, Virgil emphasizes that Latin was a source of Roman unity and tradition. In Virgil's epic "Aeneid" about the founding of Rome, the supreme deity Jupiter dictates that the refugee Trojans who have come to settle in Italy will use the language of the native Latini as a means of unification: "they will keep the speech "(sermo)" and "mores" of their fathers ... and I will make them all Latins with one mode of expression" "(uno ore," literally "with one mouth"). The Julio-Claudian emperors, who claimed descent from the Virgilian hero Aeneas, encouraged high standards of correct Latin "(Latinitas)", a linguistic movement identified in modern terms as Classical Latin, and favored Latin for conducting official business.
Romanian lexis
The lexis of the Romanian language (or Daco-Romanian), a Romance language, has changed over the centuries as the language evolved from Vulgar Latin, to Proto-Romanian, to medieval, modern and contemporary Romanian.
Romani language
Romani is the only Indo-Aryan language spoken almost exclusively in Europe (apart from emigrant populations).
Romani language
In Romania, a country with a sizable Romani minority (3.3% of the total population), there is a unified teaching system of the Romani language for all dialects spoken in the country. This is primarily a result of the work of Gheorghe Sarău, who made Romani textbooks for teaching Romani children in the Romani language. He teaches a purified, mildly prescriptive language, choosing the original Indo-Aryan words and grammatical elements from various dialects. The pronunciation is mostly like that of the dialects from the first stratum. When there are more variants in the dialects, the variant that most closely resembles the oldest forms is chosen, like ', instead of ', ', ' instead of ', ' instead of ' or ', etc.
Romani language standardization
A standardized form of Romani is used in Serbia. In Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina, Romani is one of the officially recognized minority languages – having its own radio stations and news broadcasts.
Romani people
Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is "Rom". Even when subgroups don't use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and "Gadjo" (non-Roma). For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is "Romanes".
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.
Romani people
In the Romani language, "Rom" is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural "Roma". The feminine of "Rom" in the Romani language is "Romni". However, in most cases, in other languages "Rom" is now used for people of both genders.
Angloromani language
Anglo-Romani was already developing in the seventeenth century although the change from the original English Romani is unclear. The "Winchester confessions" document disproves a sudden morphological change, and lends support to a strict linguistic separation between a Canting language and English Romani whose speakers used a separate and distinct Romani language when speaking amongst themselves. A situation which existed one hundred years later as testified by James Poulter 1775: "the English Gypsies spoke a variant of their own language that none other could understand," indicating the language was distinct from the common "Canting tongue" of England. Romani of that time was a language of everyday communication, of practical use, and not a secret language.
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.
Sardinian language
Sardinian or Sard ("sardu" , "limba sarda" or "língua sarda" ) is the primary indigenous Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on most of the island of Sardinia. It is considered one of the closest genealogical descendants, if not the closest, to Latin by many Romance linguists. However, it also incorporates a Pre-Latin (mostly Paleo-Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish and Italian superstratum due to the political membership of the island, which became a Byzantine possession followed by a significant period of self-rule, fell into the Iberian sphere of influence in the late Middle Ages, and eventually into the Italian one in the 18th century.
Romanian language
Romanian is the only Romance language where definite articles are enclitic: that is, attached to the end of the noun (as in Scandinavian, and Bulgarian), instead of in front (proclitic). They were formed, as in other Romance languages, from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.
Indo-European migrations
Today the Romance languages, which comprise all languages that descended from Latin, are spoken by more than 800 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Romance languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used in 72 countries around the globe.
Romani language
The language is recognized as a minority language in many countries. At present the only places in the world where Romani is employed as an official language are the Republic of Kosovo (only regionally, not nationally) and the Šuto Orizari Municipality within the administrative borders of the Macedonian capital of Skopje.
Romance languages
This was the pattern followed by the Romance languages: In the Romance languages that still preserved a functioning nominal case system (e.g., Romanian and Old French), only the combination of article and case ending serves to uniquely identify number and case (compare the similar situation in modern German). All Romance languages have a definite article (originally developed from "ipse" "self" but replaced in nearly all languages by "ille" "that (over there)") and an indefinite article (developed from "ūnus" "one"). Many also have a partitive article ("dē" "of" + definite article).
Demographics of Romania
About 88.9% of the people of Romania are ethnic Romanians, whose language, Romanian, is an Eastern Romance language, descended from Latin with some German, French, English, Greek, Slavic, and Hungarian borrowings. Romanians are by far the most numerous group of speakers of an Eastern Romance language today. It has been said that they constitute "an island of Latinity" in Eastern Europe, surrounded on all sides either by Slavic peoples or by the Hungarians. The Hungarian minority in Romania constitutes the country's largest minority, 6.1 per cent of the population.
Romano-Greek language
Romano-Greek (also referred to as Hellenoromani; ) is a nearly extinct mixed language (referred to as Para-Romani in Romani linguistics), spoken by the Romani people in Greece that arose from language contact between Romani speaking people and the Greek language. The language is expected to be a secret language spoken in Thessaly and Central Greece Administrative Unit. Typologically the language is structured on Greek with heavy lexical borrowing from Romani. Related variants of this language are Dortika. Dortika is a secret language spoken mainly in Athens by traveling builders from Eurytania Prefecture. In both cases, the languages are most likely not native to their speakers.
Rome
Although associated today only with Latin, ancient Rome was in fact multilingual. In highest antiquity, Sabine tribes shared the area of what is today Rome with Latin tribes. The Sabine language was one of the Italic group of ancient Italian languages, along with Etruscan, which would have been the main language of the last three kings who ruled the city till the founding of the Republic in 509 BC. Urganilla, or Plautia Urgulanilla, wife of Emperor Claudius, is thought to have been a speaker of Etruscan many centuries after this date, according to Suetonius' entry on Claudius. However Latin, in various evolving forms, was the main language of classical Rome, but as the city had immigrants, slaves, residents, ambassadors from many parts of the world it was also multilingual. Many educated Romans also spoke Greek, and there was a large Greek, Syriac and Jewish population in parts of Rome from well before the Empire.
Romanians
The Romanians ( or—historically, but now a seldom-used regionalism—"rumâni"; dated exonym: "Vlachs") are a Romance ethnic group and nation native to Romania, that share a common Romanian culture, ancestry, and speak the Romanian language, the most widespread spoken Eastern Romance language which is descended from the Latin language. According to the 2011 Romanian census, just under 89% of Romania's citizens identified themselves as ethnic Romanians.
Romansh language
Romansh is a Romance language descending from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of the Roman Empire. Within the Romance languages, Romansh stands out because of its peripheral location, which has resulted in several archaic features. Another distinguishing feature is the centuries-long language contact with German, which is most noticeable in the vocabulary and to a lesser extent the syntax of Romansh. Romansh belongs to the Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages, which includes languages such as French, Occitan, and Lombard. The main feature placing Romansh within the Gallo-Romance languages is the fronting of Latin to or , as seen in Latin "muru(m)" ("wall"), which is or in Romansh.
Vlax Romani language
Vlax Romani is a dialect group of the Romani language (Gipsy). Vlax Romani varieties are spoken mainly in Southeastern Europe by Romani people. Vlax Romani can also be referred to as an independent language or as one dialect of the Romani language. Vlax Romani is the most widely spoken dialect subgroup of the Romani language worldwide.
Languages of Romania
In Romania there are several spoken languages. Beside Romanian, the countrywide official language, other spoken languages are spoken and sometimes co-official at a local level. These languages include Hungarian, Romani, Ukrainian, German, Russian, Turkish, Tatar, Serbian, Slovak, Bulgarian, and Croatian.
Romani people in Croatia
More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.
Romani language
The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography.
The proposals to form a unified Romani alphabet and one standard Romani language by either choosing one dialect as a standard, or by merging more dialects together, have not been successful - instead, the trend is towards a model where each dialect has its own writing system. Among native speakers, the most common pattern for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary and so on.
Romani people
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. This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent but later 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.
Romani diaspora
Currently, Roma in Cyprus refer to themselves as Kurbet, and their language as "Kurbetcha", although most no longer speak it. Christian or Greek-speaking Roma are known as Mantides.
Romani language
Romani has two grammatical genders (masculine / feminine) and two numbers (singular / plural).
Romanid
Romanid is a zonal constructed language for speakers of Romance languages, intended to be understandable by speakers of the Romance languages without prior study. It was created by the Hungarian language teacher Zoltán Magyar, who published a first version in May 1956 and a second in December 1957. In 1984, he published a phrasebook with a short grammar, in which he presents a slightly more simplified version of the language.
Indo-Aryan languages
The Romani language is usually included in the Western Indo-Aryan languages. Romani — spoken mainly in various parts of Europe — 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 languages of Central India. It shares an innovative pattern of past-tense person concord with the languages of the Northwest, such as Kashmiri and Shina. This is believed to be further proof that Romani originated in the Central region, then migrated to the Northwest.
Welsh-Romani language
Welsh Romani (or Welsh Romany; sometimes also known as "Kååle") is a variety of the Romani language which was spoken fluently in Wales until at least 1950. It was spoken by the Kale group of the Romani people who arrived in Britain during the 15th century. The first record of Romani in Wales comes from the 16th century. Welsh-Romani is one of the many Northern Romani dialects.
Languages of Italy
Almost all the Romance languages native to Italy, with the notable exception of Italian, are often colloquially referred to as "dialects", although for some of them the term may coexist with other labels like "minority languages" or "vernaculars". However, the use of the term "dialect" to refer to the languages of Italy may erroneously imply that the languages spoken in Italy are actual "dialects" of Standard Italian in the prevailing linguistic sense of "varieties or variations of a language". This is not the case regarding the longstanding languages of Italy, as they are not varieties of Italian. Most of the local Romance languages of Italy predate Italian and evolved locally from Vulgar Latin, independently of what would become the national language, long before the fairly recent spread of Italian throughout Italy. In fact, Standard Italian itself can be thought of as either a continuation of, or a dialect heavily based on, Florentine Tuscan. The indigenous local Romance tongues of Italy are therefore classified as separate languages that evolved independently from Latin, rather than "dialects" or variations of the Italian language. Conversely, with the spread of Standard Italian throughout Italy in the 20th century, local varieties of Italian have also developed throughout the peninsula, influenced to varying extents by the underlying local languages, most noticeably at the phonological level; though regional boundaries seldom correspond to isoglosses distinguishing these varieties, these variations on Italians are commonly referred to as Regional Italian ("italiano regionale").
History of Romanian
Francesco della Valle writes in 1532 that "they name themselves Romei in their own language" ("si dimandano in lingua loro Romei") and, he also cites the expression "Do you know Romanian?" ("se alcuno dimanda se sano parlare in la lingua valacca, dicono a questo in questo modo: Sti Rominest ? Che vol dire: Sai tu Romano?").
Boyash
The Boyash are a branch/caste of the Roma who were forced to settle in the 14th century in the Apuseni Mountains, located in Transylvania, and work as slaves in mining (a regionalism for "mine" in Romanian: "baie," from Middle Age Slavonic). Due to their close proximity with the Romanian-speaking people, they lost the use of the Romani language, and started using the Romanian language. Some groups relearned Romani when they came in contact with other Romani-speaking Roma, after they later emigrated from Romania (for example, in Ecuador).
Özcan Purçu
Due to his knowledge in Romani language and English, Özcan Purçu was invited to become a representative of Turkish Romani people in the European Council's Romanis and Nomads Forum. During his first meeting in Strasbourg, he realized to his big surprise that all Romani people speak the same language wherever they come from.
Romani language standardization
There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the Romani language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, the United States and Sweden.
Romani language
Šebková and Žlnayová, while describing Slovakian Romani, argues that Romani is a free word order language and that it allows for theme-rheme structure, similarly to Czech, and that in some Romani dialects in East Slovakia, there is a tendency to put a verb at the end of a sentence.
Romani people in Bulgaria
The Romani people emigrated from Northern India, presumably from the northwestern Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab, possibly as early as 600 A.D. They emigrated to the Middle East and then reached the European continent. Moreover, "the Roma (the name is the plural form of the word “Rom”) moved from India at the beginning of the 12th century, reached Europe in the 14th century and Central Europe in the 15th century." The language of the Romani people is called Romani [romaňi čhib] or Romany. It is an Indic (or Indo-Aryan) language — like Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali — which belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The language retains much of the Indic morphology, phonology and lexicon, while its syntax has been heavily influenced by contact with other languages.
Eastern Romance languages
The Eastern Romance languages are a group of Romance languages that developed in Eastern Europe (specifically in the Balkans) from the local variant of Vulgar Latin. Today, the group consists of Romanian, Aromanian and two other related minor languages Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian.
Romani society and culture
The Romani language is spoken by millions of Romani people throughout the world. It is of the Indo-Aryan branch. Many Romani people are bilingual and can speak two or more languages.
Classification of Romance languages
According to this view, the next split was between Romanian in the east, and the other languages (the Italo-Western languages) in the west. One of the characteristic features of Romanian is its retention of three of Latin's seven noun cases. The third major split was more evenly divided, between the Italian branch, which comprises many languages spoken in the Italian Peninsula, and the Gallo-Iberian branch.
Bohemian Romani
In the early 20th century, Bohemian Romani was, at least in some groups of Bohemian Roma, gradually becoming a non-native ethnic language, acquired in late childhood and used mostly for secretive purposes (cf. Lesný 1916: 214–216, Lípa 1960: 50). Clearly, a development had started toward a Para-Romani variety, that is, a specialized non-native variety spoken by Roma, which has the grammar of a majority language (Czech in this case) as well as an access to Romani-derived lexicon (Elšík 2003: 44).
Sinte Romani
Sinte Romani (also known as Sintenghero Tschib(en), Sintitikes or Romanes ) is the variety of Romani spoken by the Sinti people in Germany, France, Austria, some parts of northern Italy and other adjacent regions. It is characterized by significant German influence and is not mutually intelligible with other forms of Romani. Romani is sometimes written as Romany (often in English) but native speaking people use the word Romani for the language. The language is written in Latin script and is included in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian language groups.
Dacian language
As in the case of any Romance language, it is argued that Romanian language derived from Vulgar Latin through a series of internal linguistic changes and because of Dacian or northern Thracian influences on Vulgar Latin in the late Roman era. This influence explains a number of differences between Romanian -Thracian substrate-, French -Celtic substrate-, Spanish -Basque substratum-, Portuguese -Celtic substrate ?- Romanian has no major dialects, perhaps a reflection of its origin in a small mountain region, which was inaccessible but permitted easy internal communication. The history of Romanian is based on speculation because there are virtually no written records of the area from the time of the withdrawal of the Romans around 300 AD until the end of the barbarian invasions around 1300 AD.
Eastern Romance languages
According to the generally accepted theory regarding their origin, the Eastern Romance languages, are considered to be a evolution of the Vulgar-Latin, spoken in the Balkan area during the domination of the Roman Empire. The Vulgar-Latin, in its turn, is considered to be a mixture of the ancient, local languages: Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian, and the official Latin (the language of Rome). It formed for centuries a language continuum, spread across the Balkans.
After the arrival of Slavic people in the region ( V-VII cent.), many of the indigenous people were assimilated while others were obliged to move and disperse, losing in that way the homogeneity and the previous contacts between them. As a result, the formation of the four languages, that nowadays constitute the Eastern branch of the Romance Languages family, took place.
Romance languages
The Romance languages inherited from Latin two grammatical numbers, singular and plural; the only trace of a dual number comes from Latin "ambō" > Spanish and Portuguese "ambos", Old Romanian "îmbi" > Romanian "ambii", Old French "ambe", Italian "ambedue, entrambi".
Angloromani language
The origins of the Romani language are in India, and the core of the vocabulary and grammar still resemble modern Indic languages like Urdu, Kashmiri, and Punjabi. Linguists have been investigating the dialects of Romani since the second half of the eighteenth century, and although there are no ancient written records of the language, it has been possible to reconstruct the development of Romani from the medieval languages of India to its present forms as spoken in Europe. Although the language remains similar at its core, it is sometimes quite difficult for Romani people from different regions to understand one another if they have not had any exposure to other dialects before.
Angloromani language
Up to 1547, the Romani language was an inflected language, employing two genders, plurality and case marking. Anglo-Romani is first referenced in 1566–67. Around 1873, Romani personal pronouns became inconsistently marked, according to Leland, who also notes that case distinction began fading overall, and gender marking also disappeared. Borrow notes that in 1874, some Romani speakers were still employing complete inflection, while some were adopting the English syntax with a Romani lexicon. It seems to be around 1876 that gender distinction was no longer seen; however, the continued use of Romani plural forms was noted, along with English verb conjugation. In 1923, some plural endings were still being used on nouns, but English prepositions were used instead of Romani postpositions. Current usage has lost almost all Romani morphology and instead uses English morphology with Romani lexical items.
Romance languages
The Romance languages (also called Romanic languages or Neo-Latin languages) are the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries and that form a subgroup of the Italic languages within the Indo-European language family.
Languages of Romania
Roma make up the second largest minority in Romania and 241,617 Romani speakers were reported in the 2002 census, or 1.1% of the total population. Dialects of Romani spoken include Balkan Romani, Vlax Romani, and Carpathian Romani. Romani is used in local signage, administration, education and justice in 79 communes and one town (Budești).
Para-Romani
Para-Romani are various mixed languages of non-Indo-Aryan linguistic classification containing considerable admixture from the Romani language. They are spoken as the traditional vernacular of Romani communities, either in place of, or alongside, varieties of the Romani language. Some Para-Romani languages have no structural features of Romani at all, taking only the vocabulary from Romani.
Romani language
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 AD 1000.
Romani people in Romania
In Romani, the native language of the Romani, the word for people is pronounced or depending on dialect ( or in the singular). Starting from the 1990s, the word has also been officially used in the Romanian language, although it has been used by Romani activists in Romania as far back as 1933.
Romani language
In a series of articles (beginning from 1982), Marcel Courthiade proposed a different kind of classification. He concentrates on the dialectal diversity of Romani in three successive strata of expansion, using the criteria of phonological and grammatical changes. Finding the common linguistic features of the dialects, he presents the historical evolution from the first stratum (the dialects closest to the Anatolian Romani of the 13th century) to the second and third strata. He also names as "pogadialects" (after the "" dialect of Great Britain) those with only a Romani vocabulary grafted into a non-Romani language (normally referred to as Para-Romani).
Angloromani language
The original Romani was used exclusively as a family or clan language, during occasional encounters between various Romani clans. It was not a written language, but more a conversational one, used by families to keep conversations amongst themselves in public places such as markets unintelligible to others. It was not used in any official capacity in schools or administrative matters, and so lacked the vocabulary for these terms. Such terms were simply borrowed from English. However, to keep the language undecipherable to outsiders, the Romani speakers coined new terms that were a combination or variation of the original English terms. For example, a forester is called "veshengro", from the Romani word for forest, "vesh"; a restaurant is a "habbinkerr" from the words "habbin", food, and "kerr", house, thus literally "food-house"; and a mayor is a "gavmoosh", from the words "gav", village, town, and "moosh", man, literally "town-man". Gradually, the British Romani began to give up their language in favour of English, though they retained much of the vocabulary, which they now use occasionally in English conversation – as Angloromani.
Romance languages
The Romance languages are written with the classical Latin alphabet of 23 letters – "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "V", "X", "Y", "Z" – subsequently modified and augmented in various ways. In particular, the single Latin letter "V" split into "V" (consonant) and "U" (vowel), and the letter "I" split into "I" and "J". The Latin letter "K" and the new letter "W", which came to be widely used in Germanic languages, are seldom used in most Romance languages – mostly for unassimilated foreign names and words. Indeed, in Italian prose is properly . Catalan eschews importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. Thus Wikipedia is in Catalan but in Spanish.
Romani language
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 the Iranian languages (like Persian and Kurdish) and Armenian, points to a prolonged stay in Anatolia after the departure from South Asia.
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.
Romani people in Romania
There are two spellings of the word in Romanian: "rom" (plural "romi"), and "rrom" (plural "rromi"). The first spelling is preferred by the majority of Romani NGOs and it is the only spelling accepted in Romanian Academy's Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române. The two forms reflect the fact that for some speakers of Romani there are two rhotic (ar-like) phonemes: and . In the government-sponsored (Courthiade) writing system is spelt "rr". The final "i" in "rromi" is the Romanian (not Romani) plural.
Bohemian Romani
Bohemian Romani or "Bohemian Romany" is a dialect of Romani (a European Indo-Aryan language) formerly spoken by the Romani people of Bohemia, the western part of today's Czech Republic. It became extinct after World War II, due to extermination of most of its speakers in Nazi concentration camps.
Romani language
In the 18th century, it was shown by comparative studies that Romani belongs to the Indo-European language family. 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 Sinhalese) spoken by three Sri Lankan students he met in the Netherlands. This was followed by the linguist Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger (1751–1822) whose book ' (1782) proved 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 ' (1844–45). Research into the way the Romani dialects branched out was started in 1872 by the Slavicist Franc Miklošič 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 integrating Romani into the history of Indian languages.
Romance languages
Romance languages have borrowed heavily, though mostly from other Romance languages. However, some, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and French, have borrowed heavily from other language groups. Vulgar Latin borrowed first from indigenous languages of the Roman empire, and during the Germanic folk movements, from Germanic languages, especially Gothic; for Eastern Romance languages, during Bulgarian Empires, from Slavic languages, especially Bulgarian. Notable examples are *"blancus" "white", replacing native "albus" (but Romansh "alv", Dalmatian "jualb", Romanian "alb"); *"guerra" "war", replacing native "bellum"; and the words for the cardinal directions, where cognates of English "north", "south", "east" and "west" replaced the native words "septentriō", "merīdiēs" (also "noon; midday nap"; cf. Romanian "meriză"), "oriens", and "occidens". (See History of French – The Franks.) Some Celtic words were incorporated into the core vocabulary, partly for words with no Latin equivalent ("betulla" "birch", "camisia" "shirt", "cerevisia" "beer"), but in some cases replacing Latin vocabulary ("gladius" "sword", replacing "ensis"; "cambiāre" "to exchange", replacing "mūtāre" except in Romanian and Portuguese; "carrus" "cart", replacing "currus"; "pettia" "piece", largely displacing "pars" (later resurrected) and eliminating "frustum"). Many Greek loans also entered the lexicon, e.g. "spatha" "sword" (Greek: "spáthē", replacing "gladius" which shifted to "iris", cf. French "épée", Spanish "espada", Italian "spada "and Romanian "spată"); "cara" "face" (Greek: κάρα "kára", partly replacing "faciēs"); "colpe" "blow" (Greek: κόλαφος "kólaphos", replacing "ictus", cf. Spanish "golpe", French "coup"); "cata" "each" (Greek: "katá", replacing "quisque"); common suffixes *"-ijāre/-izāre" (Greek: "-izein", French "oyer/-iser", Spanish "-ear/-izar", Italian "-eggiare/-izzare", etc.), "-ista" (Greek: "-istes").
Romansh language
Like all languages, Romansh has its own archaisms, that is, words derived from Latin that have fallen out of use in most other Romance languages. Examples include "baselgia" 'church' (Vegliote "bašalka", Romanian "biserică"), "nuidis" 'grudgingly, reluctantly' from Latin "invitus", "urar" 'to pray' (Portuguese "orar", Romanian "a ura" - to wish), "aura" 'weather' (Old French "ore", Aromanian "avrî"), "scheiver" 'carnival', "cudesch" 'book', the last two of which are only found in Romansh. The non-Engadinese dialects retain "anceiver" ~ "entschaiver" 'to begin', from Latin "incipere", otherwise found only in Romanian "începe", whereas Surmiran and Engadinese (Putèr, Vallader) and all other Romance languages retain a reflex of Latin *"cuminitiāre", e.g. Engadinese "(s)cumanzar", Italian "cominciare", French "commencer". Other examples are "memia" (adv.) 'too much' from Latin "nimia" (adj., fem.), only found in Old Occitan, "vess" 'difficult' from Latin "vix" 'seldom' (cf. Old Spanish "abés", Romanian "abia" < "ad vix"), and Engadinese "encleger" 'to understand' (vs. non-Engadinese "capir"), also found in Romanian "înțelege" and Albanian "(n)dëgjoj", from Latin "intellegere". Some unique innovations include "tedlar" 'to listen' from Latin "titulare" and "patertgar" 'to think' from "pertractare".
Romani society and culture
The Romani people are today found in many countries. Typically, Romani adopt given names that are common in the country of their residence. Seldom do modern Romani use traditional names from their own language, such as Papush, Luludi, Patrin, etc. Being the only Indo-Aryan language that has been spoken exclusively around Europe since the Middle Ages, speakers use many terms for their language. They generally refer to their language as "řomani čhib" translated as ‘the Romani language’, or "řomanes", ‘in a Rom way’. The English term, Romani, has been used by scholars since the 19th Century, where previously they had used the term 'Gypsy Language'.
Romani language
A standardized form of Romani is used in Serbia, and in Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina, Romani is one of the officially recognized languages of minorities having its own radio stations and news broadcasts.
Romanian language
Romanian (archaically Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: "limba română" , "the Romanian language", or "românește", lit. "in Romanian") is an Eastern Romance language spoken by approximately 24–26 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova, and by another 4 million people as a second language. It is an official and national language of Romania and Moldova. In addition, it is also one of the official languages of the European Union.
Romania in the Early Middle Ages
Romanians speak a language originating from the dialects of the Roman provinces north of the "Jireček Line". This line divided, in Roman times, the predominantly Greek-speaking southern provinces from those where Latin was the principal language of communication. The emergence of Proto-Romanian from Vulgar Latin is first demonstrated by the words ""torna, torna, frater"" ("turn around, turn around, brother") recorded in connection with an Eastern Roman military action in 587 or 588. The soldier shouting them "in his native tongue" spoke an Eastern Romance dialect of the Balkan Mountains.
Megleno-Romanian language
Megleno-Romanian is a member of the family of Romance languages. More specifically, it is an Eastern Romance language, a language formed after the retreat of the Roman Empire from the Balkans. Due to the fact that it is spoken by very few people and because of its similarities with the Aromanian, modern Romanian and Istro Romanian languages, some linguists consider it to be an intermediary between Romanian and Aromanian, often being considered either a dialect of Romanian, a dialect of Aromanian, or an independent language. It is closer to standard Romanian than the Aromanian language, suggesting that it split from Proto-Eastern Romance later than Aromanian. Megleno-Romanian has been strongly influenced by the neighbouring South Slavic varieties.
Indo-Aryan languages
There are no known historical documents about the early phases of the Romani language.
Gitanos
More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Linguistic evaluation carried out in the nineteenth century by Pott (1845) and Miklosich (1882–1888) showed that the Romani language is to be classed as a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), establishing that the ancestors of the Romani could not have left the Indian subcontinent significantly earlier than AD 1000, then finally reaching Europe several hundred years later.
Romansh language
The main features distinguishing Romansh from the Gallo-Italic languages to the south, and placing it closer to French, are:
Another defining feature of the Romansh language is the use of unstressed vowels. All unstressed vowels (except /a/) disappeared.
Whether or not Romansh, Friulan and Ladin should compose a separate "Rhaeto-Romance" subgroup within Gallo-Romance is an unresolved issue, known as the "Questione ladina". Some linguists posit that these languages are descended from a common language, which was fractured geographically through the spread of German and Italian. The Italian linguist Graziadio Ascoli first made the claim in 1873. The other position holds that any similarities between these three languages can be explained through their relative geographic isolation, which shielded them from certain linguistic changes. By contrast, the Gallo-Italic varieties of Northern Italy were more open to linguistic influences from the South. Linguists who take this position often point out that the similarities between the languages are comparatively few. This position was first introduced by the Italian dialectologist Carlo Battisti.