Romani or Romanes is the language of the Roma (who also include the Sinti). It belongs together with languages such as Hindi and Urdu to the Indo-Aryan language group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.
In Europe, Romani is spoken by around 4 million people. In several European states (e.g. in Germany and Austria) Romani is an officially recognised minority language. It is assumed that the speakers of Romani came from Central Asia and slowly, in a number of migrations cycles, migrated via the Caucasus and Asia Minor to Europe. As a consequence, Romani developed independently of the other Indo-Iranian languages for over 800 years, 700 of which took place in Europe. Romani was foremost influenced by the languages of the Balkans, especially by Byzantine Greek, which left its marks on all sub-forms of the Romani language.
Hello - latscho diewes
The influence of the European contact languages had as an effect that in all the Romani-dialects the proportion of words from these languages is larger than the proportion of original Indo-Iranian vocabulary. Attempts to establish Romani as a written language were not successful until in the 20th century. Since the eighties the language commission of the international Romani-Union has been working on a standardised spelling based on the Latin alphabet, which formerly has been used by the National Council of the Roma. The written use of Romani is becoming increasingly more popular. Romani is not only written in the Latin alphabet, but also in the Cyrillic and Devanagari alphabets.
Roma in Slovakia (84.000 Speaker)
Roma in Poland (60.000 Speaker)
Roma in Bulgaria (314.000 Speaker)
Roma in Moldova (12.000 Speaker)
Roma in Hungary (600.000 Speaker)
Roma in Lithuania (3.000 Speaker)
Roma in Estonia (1.500 Speaker)
Roma in Latvia (8.000 Speaker)
Roma in Ukraine (48.000 Speaker)
Roma in Russia (153.000 Speaker)
Roma in Romania (535.000 Speaker)
Roma in Turkey (545.000 Speaker)
Sinti and Roma in Germany (50.000 Speaker)
Roma in Greece (22.000 Speaker)
Roma in Switzerland (30.000 Speaker)
Sinti and Roma in Netherlands (40.000 Speaker)
Roma in Denmark (1.500 Speaker)
Roma in Italy (130.000 Speaker)
Roma in Spain (631.000 Speaker)
Roma in United Kingdom (90.000 Speaker)
Roma in Portugal (105.000 Speaker)
Roma and Sinti in Austria (20.000 Speaker)
Roma in Ireland (24.000 Speaker)
Roma in Montenegro (5.251 Speaker)
Roma in Slovenia (2.500 Speaker)
Roma in Kosovo (35.784 Speaker)
Roma in Serbia (147.604 Speaker)
Roma in Czech Republic (12.000 Speaker)
Roma in Belarus (11.000 Speaker)
Roma in Sweden (40.000 Speaker)
Roma in Albania (5.000 Speaker)
Roma in Finland (10.000 Speaker)
Roma in Norway (5.000 Speaker)
Roma in Macedonia (44.000 Speaker)
Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina (6.000 Speaker)
Roma in Croatia (10.000 Speaker)