The last nomadic people of the western world have many names. In England they are called gypsies, in France gitans or bohemian. We call them 'Gypsies', but they call themselves romani or rom, a name that also indicates their language. But where do these people and their language actually come from?
The roots of Romani lie in Central India. The language is part of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. That language family is part of Indo-European, the ancestor of most current European languages. Romani was spoken by an Indian ethnic group referred to as Ḍom, Ḍum or Ḍōmba (ḍom> řom). This group was described as a caste of low status and included cleaners, musicians, singers, metal workers and basket makers.
Proto-Romani:the ancient gypsy language
The original language has not been preserved, but scientists are trying to find this ancient gypsy language on the basis of surviving dialects. This reconstructed language is called Proto-Romani or *Ḍommānī and shows many similarities with other ancient Indic languages, such as Sanskrit. An example of this is the word šun- (to hear), which in Sanskrit is śr̥n-. These similarities indicate that it was Proto-Romani just after 500 BC. formed a Central Indian language.
around 50 A.D. ch. the people moved to the northwest of India. This can be deduced from sound changes that the Central Indian languages made and that the Romani did not receive. In the northwest, and thus also in Romani, words with the consonant combinations tr and št were preserved. The words patrin (leaf) and misto (good) for example, retained these consonant combinations, while around that time in Central India the same words had been changed to patta and miṭṭha .
The spread
But it didn't stop there. Romani changed drastically through contacts with the Byzantine Greeks around the tenth century AD. ch. This new phase of Romani is called Early Romani. In addition to Greek, which was spoken in the Byzantine Empire, Iranian and Armenian were also spoken in that empire. Words from those languages are also included in Romani. This indicates that the Romani had intensive contacts with these peoples and had moved further to the Balkans.
Examples of Greek influences are words like drom (road) and numbers like efta (seven), oxto (eight) and enja (nine). It is also striking that noun endings have been adopted, such as prezident-os (president) and slug-as (slave) .
Today
When the influence of the Byzantines waned at the end of the fourteenth century, the Romani groups moved from the Balkans to Western Europe. There they spread over many countries and formed new dialects. These dialects in turn took over language features of the country of residence, but in turn they also influenced the languages of their host country. For example, in Dutch we have the words bink (literally:devil), moles (beat to death) and whoa (dog) taken over.