Romani

Where it’s spoken

Romani (Romani ćhib) is the language of the Roma diaspora, spread across Europe, the Americas, and beyond following the Roma’s migration from northwestern India around 1,000 years ago. Major speaker concentrations are in the Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, North Macedonia), Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, Turkey, and Russia. Many Romani communities use varieties classified as Vlax, Balkan, Northern, or Central Romani.

What it sounds like

Romani retains much of its Indo-Aryan grammatical inheritance — case markings on nouns, two grammatical genders, and verb conjugations by person. Its phonology reflects layered contact with Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Hungarian, and German over centuries. Many varieties have aspirated/unaspirated stop contrasts inherited from Indo-Aryan.

How it’s written

Romani has no single official orthography. Most varieties use the Latin alphabet, with diacritics borrowed from local languages (č, š, ž from Czech/Slovak; ć, ś from Polish; ş from Romanian/Turkish). A few varieties use Cyrillic in Russian-influenced contexts.

History

Roma people migrated from India through Persia and the Byzantine Empire into Europe between the 11th and 14th centuries. The 5th World Romani Congress in 2000 standardized some pan-Romani spelling principles, but practice remains diverse.