Contemporary Peripatetic Minorities in Europe and Asia
See also: Eurasian nomads and Nomadic peoples of Europe"Peripatetic minorities" are mobile populations moving among settled populations offering a craft or trade.
Each existing community is primarily endogamous, and subsists traditionally on a variety of commercial and/or service activities. Formerly, all or a majority of their members were itinerant, and this largely holds true today. Migration generally takes place within the political boundaries of a single state these days.
Each of the peripatetic communities is multilingual; it speaks one or more of the languages spoken by the local sedentary populations, and, additionally, within each group, a separate dialect or language is spoken. The latter are either of Indic or Iranian origin, and many are structured somewhat like an argot or secret language, with vocabularies drawn from various languages. There are indications that in northern Iran at least one community speaks Romani language, and some groups in Turkey also speak Romani.
Read more about this topic: Nomad
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, minorities, europe and/or asia:
“A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europe has endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“[N]o combination of dictator countries of Europe and Asia will halt us in the path we see ahead for ourselves and for democracy.... The people of the United States ... reject the doctrine of appeasement.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)