Language
Most Romanies speak one of several dialects of Romani, an Indo-Aryan language. They also will often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries, especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló, Angloromany, and Scandoromani.
There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, the USA, and Sweden. Romani is not currently spoken in India.
Read more about this topic: Romani People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jing by gee by gosh by gum”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)