1.
Romani people
–
The Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym Gypsies, which some people consider pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity. Romani are dispersed, with their populations in Europe – especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe including Turkey, Spain. Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas, there are an estimated one million Roma in the United States, and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes some Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisition in the colonial era, in migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora, the Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large, 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. French bohème, bohémien, from the Kingdom of Bohemia, whence they came, Rom means man or husband in the Romani, it has the variants dom and lom, related with the Sanskrit words dam-pati, dama, lom, lomaka loman, roman. Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma, Sanskrit सिनधु is a river or stream of water in general. In particular, it denotes the river Indus and the country around it, in the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning man of the Roma ethnic group or man, husband, with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni, however, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of all genders. Romani is the adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as a name, while others do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group. Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a r, i. e. rrom. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/, the rr spelling is common in certain institutions, or used in certain countries, e. g. Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians. In the English language, Rom is a noun and an adjective, while Romani is also a noun, both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy. Romani was initially spelled Rommany, then Romany, while today the Romani spelling is the most popular spelling, occasionally, the double r spelling mentioned above is also encountered in English texts. The term Roma is increasingly encountered during recent decades, as a term for the Romani people
2.
Archaeology of the Romani people
–
The Romani people has a long history, and most likely hails from the Indian subcontinent. Throughout said history, the highly diverse Roma population has faced significant persecution – antiziganism – in many parts of the world, in modern times, even when this issue gradually being resolved in some areas, the field of Romani archaeology remains virtually unexplored. This is especially the case in Sweden and Norway, where the Norwegian, two sites in particular have gone through several stages of excavation, with a third excavation project beginning in 2015. One is Snarsmon, a Romani village close to the Norwegian border in Tanum Municipality which was active as a sanctuary from the 1860s until the first years of the 20th century, surveys began in 2003, with yearly excavations between 2004 and 2007. The second Swedish site is Krämarstaden, likewise a Romani village, the village was established in the first years of the 20th century, and abandoned in the beginning of the 1920s. In August 2015, excavations began at a Romani campsite outside of Stockholm, the camp was built in 1959 by the Swedish state as a temporary solution, until apartments could be arranged for the Romani, who had just been given full civic rights. The camp soon became permanent as the process was dragged out, its inhabitants – about thirty people – living in tents, caravans. It will result in a book and a report, in addition to certain finds forming part of the Swedens History exhibition at the Swedish History Museum. One of these, Tattardalen in Kungälv Municipality, is a ruined farmstead dating back to the 1600s, another example of possibly Romani-related archaeology is a June 2010 excavation of the Caird’s Cave in Rosemarkie, Scotland, a site possibly inhabited by Scottish Gypsy and Traveller groups. In addition to archaeology directly relating to Romani sites, there have also some research done into the archaeogenetics. Contemporary archaeology Ethnoarchaeology Timeline of Romani history
3.
Romani society and culture
–
The Romani people have similar value systems and worldviews. Linguistic and phonological research has traced the Roma peoples first place of origin to places in the Indian subcontinent, many report in extracts from popular literature that Romani emerged from the North-west regions of India, rather than from Central India. Features of phonological developments which emerged during the transition stage from Old to Middle Indic prove that the history of Romani began in Central India. Other factors such as groups and unwritten customs also suggest Central Indian origins of the Roma. The Roma find issues with recalling their own exact origin due to a lack of records left by ancestors. Their history however is retold by clan family customs, such as singing and storytelling, the Romani people are today found in many countries. Typically, Romani adopt given names that are common in the country of their residence, seldom do modern Romani use traditional names from their own language, such as Papush, Luludi, Patrin, etc. Being the only Indo-Aryan language that has been spoken exclusively around Europe since the Middle Ages and they generally refer to their language as řomani čhib translated as ‘the Romani language’, or řomanes, ‘in a Rom way’. The English term, Romani, has been used by scholars since the 19th Century, the traditional Romanies place a high value on the extended family. Marriage in Romani society underscores the importance of family and demonstrates ties between different groups, often transnationally, traditionally an arranged marriage is the desired set up, with the parents of each family looking for an ideal partner for their child. Parents rarely force a particular spouse on their child, although being married by your mid twenties is generally regarded as the norm, school, other marriages, and events are also a popular environment for finding a prospective spouse, however they should be supervised by an adult. With the emergence of social media such as Facebook and mobile phones, in some Roma groups, for example the Finnish Roma, the idea of marriage is ignored altogether. Men and women often marry young, the Romani practice of child marriage has generated controversy in many countries. In 2003, one of the many self-styled Romani kings, Ilie Tortică, a Romani patriarch, Florin Cioabă, ran afoul of Romanian authorities in late 2003 when he married off his youngest daughter, Ana-Maria at the age of twelve, well below the legal marriageable age. Bride kidnapping is thought to be a traditional Romani practice, girls as young as twelve years old may be kidnapped for marriage to teenage boys. This practice has been reported in Ireland, England, the Czech Republic, kidnapping has been seen as a way to avoid a bride price or a way for a girl to marry a boy she wants but that her parents do not want. The traditions normalisation of kidnapping puts young women at risk of becoming victims of human trafficking. The practices of kidnapping and child marriage are not universally accepted throughout Romani culture
4.
Romani language
–
Romani is any of several languages of the Romani people belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own, the largest of these are Vlax Romani, Balkan Romani, and Sinte Romani. The differences between various varieties can be as big as, for example, differences between various Slavic languages, speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as řomani čhib the Romani language or řomanes in a Rom way. This derives from the Romani word řom, meaning either a member of the group or husband and this is also where the term Roma derives in English, although some Roma groups refer to themselves using other demonyms. The English spelling Rromani language may also be found, reflecting a different transcription of the Romani phoneme ř, before the late nineteenth century, English-language texts usually referred to the language as the Gypsy language. In the USA, gypsy is still the term, as Romani is not in common use there. In the 18th century, it was shown by studies that Romani belongs to the Indo-European language family. Romani is an Indo-Aryan language that is part of the Balkan sprachbund and it is the only New Indo-Aryan spoken exclusively outside of the Indian subcontinent. Romani is sometimes classified in the Central Zone or Northwestern Zone Indo-Aryan languages, Romani shares a number of features with the Central Zone languages. The most significant isoglosses are the shift of Old Indo-Aryan r̥ to u or i, however, unlike other Central Zone languages, Romani preserves many dental clusters. This implies that Romani split from the Central Zone languages before the Middle Indo-Aryan period, however, Romani shows some features of New Indo-Aryan, such as erosion of the original nominal case system towards a nominative/oblique dichotomy, with new grammaticalized case suffixes added on. This means that the Romani exodus from India could not have happened until late in the first millennium CE, many words are similar to the Marwari and Lambadi languages spoken in large parts of India. However, Romani is nearer to the Marwari spoken in Rajasthan, Romani also shows some similarity to the Northwestern Zone languages. In particular, the grammaticalization of enclitic pronouns as person markers on verbs is also found in such as Kashmiri. This evidences a northwest migration during the split from the Central Zone languages consistent with a migration to Europe. Based on these data, Matras views Romani as kind of Indian hybrid, to r and ř, and shift of inflectional -a to -o. After exiting the Indian subcontinent, Romani was heavily affected by contact with European languages, the most significant of these was Medieval Greek, which contributed lexically, phonemically, and grammatically to Early Romani. This includes inflectional affixes for nouns, and verbs that are productive with borrowed vocabulary, the shift to VO word order
5.
History of the Romani people
–
The Romani people, also referred to depending on the sub-group as Roma, Sinti or Sindhi, or Kale are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, who live primarily in Europe. They originated in northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent 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 groups were cut off from their return to the subcontinent by conflicts and moved west, eventually settling in Europe, Turkey. The absence of traditional stories and of a written history has meant that the origin. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as the late 18th century, the genetic evidence identified an Indian origin for Roma. One theory suggests that the name derives from a form ḍōmba- man of low caste living by singing and music. 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 Ghaznavi and these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire between AD1000 and 1030. Genetic evidence connects the Romani people to the descendants of groups which emigrated from South Asia towards Central Asia during the medieval period, 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. Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India, the Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves from the Indian subcontinent, separated by several centuries. Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Hindi, note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek. 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 and mitochondrial DNA 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 South Asia, mitochondrial haplogroup M, most common in Indian subjects and rare outside Southern Asia, accounts for nearly 30% of Romani people. A more detailed study of Polish Roma shows this to be of the M5 lineage, 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 known only in subjects of Indian ancestry. This is considered to be the best evidence of the Indian ancestry of the Romanis, the Romanis have been described as a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations. The number of common Mendelian disorders found among Romanis from all over Europe indicates a common origin and founder effect. See also this table, A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests a number of related founders
6.
Erromintxela
–
Erromintxela is the distinctive language of a group of Romani living in the Basque Country, who also go by the name Erromintxela. It is sometimes called Basque Caló or Errumantxela in English, caló vasco, romaní vasco, or errominchela in Spanish, although detailed accounts of the language date to the end of the 19th century, linguistic research only began in the 1990s. The development of mixed language was facilitated by the unusually deep integration of the Erromintxela people into Basque society. The language is in decline, most of the one thousand remaining speakers live on the coast of Labourd and in the mountainous regions of Soule, Navarre, Gipuzkoa. The Erromintxela are the descendants of a 15th-century wave of Kalderash Roma who entered the Basque Country via France, both ethnically and linguistically, they are distinct from the Caló-speaking Romani people in Spain and the Cascarot Romani people of the Northern Basque Country. Romanichel is in turn a French rendering of the Romani phrase Romani čel Romani person, early attestations of the name in Basque include Errama-itçéla, Erroumancel, later errumanzel and erremaitzela. The initial E- is the Basque prosthetic vowel, added because no Basque word may begin with an R-, if this etymology is correct, it is a rare case of a native Romani name for themselves being borrowed by another language. The people identify themselves as ijitoak, Basque for gypsies, but more specifically as Erromintxela, in contrast to the Caló Romani, whom they refer to as the xango-gorriak, Basque for red-legs. There are currently an estimated 500 speakers in the Southern Basque Country in Spain, approximately 2% of a population of 21,000 Romanis, and another estimated 500 in France. In Spain the remaining fluent speakers are elderly people mostly over the age of 80, some are fluent in Spanish, Basque. Middle-aged Erromintxela are mostly passive bilinguals, and the youngest speak only Basque or Spanish, in the Northern Basque Country, however, the language is still being passed on to children. To date, there has been little literary production in the language, the Erromintxela arrived in the Basque Country in the 15th century speaking Kalderash Romani. They integrated much more deeply into Basque society than other Romani groups, in the process, they acquired the Basque language and adopted aspects of Basque culture such as increased rights of women and important traditions such as bertsolaritza and pelota. Muñoz and Lopez de Mungia suspect that the morphological and phonological similarities between Romani and Basque facilitated the adoption of Basque grammar by the bilingual Romanis and it appears that many Romanis chose to stay in the Basque Country to escape persecution elsewhere in Europe. Nonetheless, even here they were not safe from persecution, for example, the Royal Council of Navarre in 1602 passed an edict to round up all vagabonds, who were to be condemned to 6 years of galley duty. By the 18th century however attitudes had changed, and the emphasis shifted towards integration, in 1780–1781 the Courts of Navarre passed Law 23, which called for the authorities to take care of them, find them locations for settlement and honest occupations and ways of living. The oldest account of the dates to 1855, when the French ethnographer Justin Cenac-Moncaut located the Erromintxela primarily in the Northern Basque Country. The oldest coherent Erromintxela text, a poem entitled Kama-goli, published by Basque writer Jon Mirande in a collection of Basque poetry and he worked with two female informants, a mother and her daughter from the Uhart-Mixe area near Saint-Palais, whom he describes as highly fluent
7.
Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina
–
According to the 1991 census, there were 8,864 Romani in Bosnia and Herzegovina or 0.2 percent of the population. Yet, the number was much higher. The BiH Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees conducted in 2010 a process of registration, recording a number of 17,000 Roma. The MHRR estimates that there are at least 25,000 to 30,000 Roma resident in BiH, according to the Ministry, around 42 percent of the Romani population in BiH is below 19 years old. The OSCE estimates the whole Romani population in Bosnia and Herzegovina at 40, estimates for the whole Roma population living in Bosnia and Herzegovina range between 65,000 and 70,000. Kali Sara and other local Roma NGOs put the number of Roma in BiH at between 80,000 and 100,000, the Romani people originate from Northern India, presumably from the northwestern Indian states Rajasthan and Punjab. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi and it shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali. Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India, in February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora, there have been Romani people in Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 600 years. Roma are deemed to have arrived in the territory of todays Bosnia and Herzegovina by the 14th–15th centuries, already then, Roma were stigmatised and had to live in settlements outside city boundaries. Rousseau, the French consul in Bosnia and Herzegovina, estimated in 1866 a number of 9,965 or 1.1 percent of the population were Romani. Johann Roskiewicz estimated in 1867 the number of the Gypsies in Bosnia at 9,000 and in Herzegovina at 2,500, attitudes towards Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina hardened during the Austro-Hungarian forty-years rule, also due to rumours that Roma lived off immoral earnings. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica mentions 18,000 Romani in Bosnia, the worst period for Bosnian Roma came with World War Two, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was included in the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia. It is estimated that 28,000 Roma perished in the conflict, in Socialist Jugoslavia, the situation of Roma improved considerable, as they became officially recognised as a “national minority”, and came to enjoy a large degree of security and welfare. During the war in Bosnia of 1992–1995, the Roma suffered mistreatment by all parties, being often considered as agents of the enemy. Over 30,000 Bosnian Roma were expelled based on ethnic cleansing, Roma were subject to inhumane conditions in concentration camps and entire communities were destroyed. Important communities are living in Brčko, Bijeljina, Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar, Tuzla, Kakanj, Prijedor, Zenica and Teslić. The largest number of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina live in the Tuzla Canton, of which a sizeable proportion in the municipality of Tuzla, as well as in Živinice, the Sarajevo Canton hosts around 7,000 Roma families, mostly in the municipality of Novi Grad
_p235_-_THE_WANDERING_MUSICANS_IN_THE_WINE-GARDENS.jpg)