Romany (redirected from Romani)

Romany (rŏm`ənē, rō`–), language belonging to the Dardic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-Iranian languages). The mother tongue of the Gypsies, Romany has about 2 million speakers, largely outside India. The Gypsies apparently began migrating from NW India westward before the 9th cent. A.D. and had reached SE Europe before the 14th cent. They now live principally in central and E Europe and in Spain, although there are groups in the Western Hemisphere as well. Romany has three main dialectal groups: Asian, Armenian, and European. In grammar it can be traced back to Sanskrit. It has borrowed considerable vocabulary from the languages of the various peoples among whom its speakers have lived and roamed. There is no important literature in Romany, but some biblical translations into Romany exist, for which both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets were used.

Bibliography

See J. Sampson, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1925); R. L. Turner, Position of Romani in Indo-Aryan (1927); J. Kochanowski, Gypsy Studies (1963).

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Romany, Romani

1. 

a. another name for a Gypsy

b. (as modifier): Romany customs

2. the language of the Gypsies, belonging to the Indic branch of the Indo-European family, but incorporating extensive borrowings from local European languages. Most of its 250 000 speakers are bilingual. It is extinct in Britain

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Romany 

the language of the Gypsies. Romany, which belongs to the neo-Indic group of Indo-European languages, developed in isolation from the Indie languages, to which it is closely related. It preserved the basic lexicon of the Old Indie languages and a typological resemblance to the Middle Indic and Modern Indic languages.

The principal phonetic features of Romany include the devoicing of voiced aspirates (gh > kh, dh > th,bh > ph), the weakening of aspiration (ch > c, th > t, bh > b), the loss of retroflexion (ṭ > r, ḍ > r, ḍh > r, ṣ > s, ṣṭ > št), and the devoicing of affricates (j > c). In Romany, positions have come to be used as case endings. Other morphological features of Romany include a distinction between the stem in the direct case and the stem in oblique cases, the lack of an accusative case for inanimate nouns, and the presence of compound forms in the future tense.

Ethnic groups of Gypsies, which have migrated along different routes, speak different dialects that have been more or less influenced in vocabulary, phonetics, and syntax by surrounding languages. Because of the Gypsies’ long residence in the Byzantine Empire, Romany absorbed several features common to Balkan languages. For example, it adopted the use of articles (masculine o, feminine e and i) and lost the earlier infinitive, which was replaced by personal forms of the subjunctive with the prepositive particle te- (in certain modern dialects of Romany these forms of the subjunctive are losing their significance as personal forms).

REFERENCES

Venttsel’, T. V. Tsyganskii iazyk. Moscow, 1964.
Venttsel’, T. V., and L. N. Cherenkov. “Dialekty tsyganskogo iazyka.” In the collection lazyki Azii i Afriki, book 1. Moscow, 1976.
Sergievskii, M. V., comp. Tsygansko-russkii slovar’. Moscow, 1938.
Turner, R. L. The Position of Romani in Indo-Aryan. London, 1927.
Kochanowski, J. Gypsy Studies, vols. 1–2. New Delhi, 1963.
Wolf, S. A. Grosses Wörterbuch der Zigeunersprache (Romani tšiw). Mannheim, 1960.
Rishi, W. R. Multilingual Romani Dictionary. Chandigarh, 1974.

T. V. VENTTSEL’