The future of the Romani language

Romanis historical distribution

Today, April 8, is International Romani Day.

The Romani language belongs to the family of neo-Indian languages. It is closely related to Hindi and has its roots in Sanskrit. However, Romani shares features of European languages as well, as some European languages influenced Romani (Greek, Romanian, Turkish and some Slavonic languages). This makes Romani unique, not only because Romani is the only Indian language spoken outside of India, but also because it is an Indo-European language related to other European languages.

Romani developed outside of India during the period of Roma migration from India to Europe some 1,000 years ago. On their way to Europe, Roma came in contact with different languages and those languages influenced the Romani lexicon and …