Av Rolf Theil

Many related languages across Europe are called Romani. To separate them, we call them Norwegian-Romani, Swedish-Romani, Finnish-Romani, English-Romani, Welsh-Romani and so on. We use Romani as a generic term for the entire language group.

People who spoke Romani went to the Balkans from Asia Minor in the mid-thirteenth  century. Their language clearly shows that they originally came from the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. About 60% of the words and most of the grammatical structures in traditional Romani languages originate from Indo-Aryan languages. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken mainly  in Pakistan, Nepal, northern India and Bangladesh. Examples of Indo-Aryan languages include Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali and Bengali.

See the language's migration route on the map below:

The red line on the map shows the approximate “migration route" from northern India via the Balkans, to Norway. We do not know exactly when the first Romani-speaking people left India, but, based on linguistics, we can establish that it must have happened after the year 1000. We do not know why they left India or how they travelled.

In the table below, some words from Norwegian-Romani are compared to the corresponding words in Hindi. This shows that Romani, Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages have the same origins, namely Early Indo-Aryan, which was spoken in northern India more than 2,000 years ago. The Hindi words are rendered in a scientific writing style, with “our” written version of the Romani word in parenthesis.

The Romani language group is divided into four main groups: Balkan, Wallachian, Central and Northern Romani. While Norwegian-Romani and the closely related Swedish-Romani belong to the northern group, the language of the Norwegian Roma/Gypsies is a variant of Wallachian Romani.

Wallachia (in Romanian Valahia or Vlahia) is the name of a region in Romania. For centuries, many Roma people worked as slaves in present-day Romania, but when slavery was abolished around 1860, the freed slaves dispersed throughout Europe. They came to Norway in the 1860s, and their language is called Romanés – a word that really means "in Gypsy ways" or "in Roma ways."

The native words (the un-borrowed words) in European Romani establish that the group of languages originated in northern India, while the loanwords indicate where the people travelled. On the way from India to the Balkans, Romani has picked up loanwords from Persian, Ossetian, Armenian and Greek, so the Romani-speaking people must have stayed in or travelled through areas where these languages were spoken.

In earlier times, Armenian was spoken across much of eastern Asia Minor, so the Romani-speaking people would not have needed to be in present-day Armenia to come across the Armenian language. They had already met Greeks in Asia Minor. Romani has no loanwords from Turkish. This is because the Turks were not yet a dominant people in Asia Minor when the Romani-speaking people lived there.

The three tables below show nine words that Romani has borrowed from Persian, Armenian and Greek. The words in these languages, which all use different alphabets, are rendered in a scientific writing style with with “our” written version of the Romani word in parenthesis.

The Romani language came to Europe in the mid-thirteenth  century, and by the year 1500 Romani speakers had spread to the entire continent. The distinction between Balkan, Wallachian, Central and Northern Romani is the result of the dispersal patterns of the Romani people at the time. People who spoke Romani reached the Nordic region around the year 1500, and Norwegian-Romani is a direct descendant of the Romani language that came here 500 years ago.

Several loanwords indicate that the Romani-speaking people travelled through Slavic and German-speaking areas on their way to the Nordic region. Here are some examples of Slavic (illustrated with Croatian) and German (illustrated with High German/Low German) loanwords:

The Tater people are featured in Norwegian with different names from those that they use about themselves: fant, splint and fark, and several of the other names, reveal a lack of knowledge about the people’s identity and origin. 

Tater/Romani people are the official names of this group. Tater is a name many in the group use; others prefer to be called Romani people. Travellers is also a name that is commonly used.  There are also names in Romani such as Tavring and Vandri.