The Romani (also spelled Romany), or Roma, are an ethnicity of Indian origin, living mostly in Europe and the Americas.[24][25] Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym "Gypsies" (or Gipsies). Other exonyms are Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians and Sinti.
Romani are dispersed, with their concentrated populations in Europe—especially Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France. They originated in India and arrived in Mid-West Asia, then Europe, around 1,000 years ago,[26] either separating from the Dom people or, at least, having a similar history;[27] the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the sixth and eleventh century.[26]
Since the nineteenth century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[4] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisitionin the colonial era.[28] In migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[29]
The Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million.[30] The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.[31]
The Romani people, also referred to depending on the sub-group as Roma, Sinti or Sindhi, Kale, or Romani , are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, who live primarily in Europe. They originated in northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent[1][2][3] and left sometime between the 6th and 11th century to work in Middle Eastern courts of their own volition, or as slaves. A small number of nomadic groups were cut off from their return to the subcontinent by conflicts and moved west,[1] eventually settling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa via Iran.[4]
Contents
[hide]Origin[edit]
The Romani have been described by Diana Muir Appelbaum as unique among peoples because they have never identified themselves with a territory; they have no tradition of an ancient and distant homeland from which their ancestors migrated, nor do they claim the right to national sovereignty in any of the lands where they reside, rather, Romani identity is bound up with the ideal of freedom expressed, in part, in having no ties to a homeland.[5] The absence of traditional origin stories and of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Romani people was long an enigma. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as 200 years ago.[6]
Genetic evidence identified an indian origin for Roma.[7][8] One theory suggests that the name ultimately derives from a formḍōmba- 'man of low caste living by singing and music', attested in Classical Sanskrit.[9] An alternative view is that the ancestors of the Romani were part of the military in Northern India. When there were invasions by Sultan Mahmud Ghaznaviand these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire between AD 1000 and 1030.[10]
Genetic evidence connects the Romani people the descendants of groups which emigrated from South Asia towards Central Asia during the medieval period.[11]
Language origins[edit]
Linguistic evidence indicates the Romanies originated from the Rajasthani people, emigrating from India no earlier than the 11th century.[12]
Linguistically speaking, the Romani language is a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA) − it has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Until around the year 1000, the Indo-Aryan languages, named Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). By around the start of the 2nd millennium, they changed over to the NIA phase, losing the neuter gender.
Most of the neuter nouns became masculine, while a few became feminine. For instance, the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit language, became the feminine आग (āg) in Hindi and jag in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages suggest that the change occurred in South Asia.
Vagish Shastri posits that it is impossible that the ancestors of the Romani people left India prior to AD 1400. They then stayed in the Byzantine Empire for several hundred years. However, the Muslim expansion, mainly under the Seljuk Turks, into the Byzantine Empire recommenced the movement of the Romani people.[13]
Until the mid-to-late 18th century, theories of the origin of the Romani were mostly speculative. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published his research that pointed out the relationship between the Romani language and Hindustani.[14] Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India,[15] with Romani grouping most closely with Sinhalese in a recent study.[16]
The majority of historians accepted this as evidence of an Sindhi origin for the Romanies, though some scholars maintained that the Romanies acquired the language through contact with Indian merchants.[17]
Domari and Romani language[edit]
Main article: Domari language
Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the South Asia, but more recent research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) Saraiki language group of languages. The Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves from the Indian subcontinent, separated by several centuries.[18][19]
Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Hindi and Persian forms for comparison.[20] Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.
| Hindi | Romani | Domari | Lomavren | Persian | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ek | ekh, jekh | yika | yak, yek | yak, yek |
| 2 | do | duj | dī | lui | du, do |
| 3 | tīn | trin | tærən | tərin | se |
| 4 | cār | štar | štar | išdör | čahār |
| 5 | pāñc | pandž | pandž | pendž | pandž |
| 6 | che | šov | šaš | šeš | šaš, šeš |
| 7 | sāt | ifta | xaut | haft | haft |
| 8 | āţh | oxto | xaišt | hašt | hašt |
| 9 | nau | inja | na | nu | nuh, noh |
| 10 | das | deš | des | las | dah |
| 20 | bīs | biš | wīs | vist | bist |
| 100 | sau | šel | saj | saj | sad |
Genetic evidence[edit]
Further evidence for the South Asian origin of the Romanies came in the late 1990s. Researchers doing DNA analysis discovered that Romani populations carried large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) and mitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia.
47.3% of Romani men carry Y chromosomes of haplogroup H-M82 which is rare outside the South Asia.[21] Mitochondrial haplogroup M, most common in Indian subjects and rare outside Southern Asia, accounts for nearly 30% of Romani people.[21] A more detailed study of Polish Roma shows this to be of the M5 lineage, which is specific to India.[22] Moreover, a form of the inherited disorder congenital myasthenia is found in Romani subjects. This form of the disorder, caused by the 1267delG mutation, is otherwise known only in subjects of Indian ancestry. This is considered to be the best evidence of the Indian ancestry of the Romanies.[23]
The Romanies have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations".[24] The number of common Mendelian disorders found among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".[24] See also this table:[25]
A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group".[26] Also the study pointed out that "genetic drift and different levels and sources of admixture, appear to have played a role in the subsequent differentiation of populations".[26] The same study found that "a single lineage ... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males.
A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romanies are "a founder population of common origins that has subsequently split into multiple socially divergent and geographically dispersed Gypsy groups".[23] The same study revealed that this population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".[23]