Understanding the Romani Language & Providing Professional Romani Interpreters and Translators
Global Interpreting understands the importance of working in the Romani language. For over 10 years, Global Interpreting has worked with the Romani language as well as hundreds of other from around the word. We are a one stop full language service provider. Offering Over the Phone, Video Remote, Face to Face, Transcription, Document and Website Translation in 150 languages including American Sign Language (ASL) nation and worldwide.
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy (Romani: rromani ćhib) is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romany are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romany (about 900,000 speakers), Balkan Romany (700,000) Carpathian Romany (500,000) and Sinte Romany (300,000). Linguistic evaluation carried out in the nineteenth century by Pott (1845) and Miklosich (1882–1888) showed that the Romani language is to be a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), establishing that the ancestors of the Romani could not have left India significantly earlier than AD 1000.
The principal argument favoring a migration during or after the transition period to NIA is the loss of the old system of nominal case, and its reduction to just a two-way case system, nominative vs. oblique. A secondary argument concerns the system of gender differentiation. Romani has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Middle Indo-Aryan languages (named MIA) generally had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and some modern Indo-Aryan languages retain this old system even today.
A long-standing common categorization was a division between the Vlax (from Vlach) from non-Vlax dialects. Vlax are those Roma people who lived many centuries in the territory of Romania in slavery. The main distinction between the two groups is the degree to which their vocabulary is borrowed from Romanian. Bernard Gilliath-Smith first made this distinction, and coined the term Vlax in 1915 in the book The Report on the Gypsy tribes of North East Bulgaria. The Vlax dialect group, now seen as just one of about ten groups (see below), has nevertheless become very widespread geographically.
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy (Romani: rromani ćhib) is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romany are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romany (about 900,000 speakers), Balkan Romany (700,000) Carpathian Romany (500,000) and Sinte Romany (300,000). Linguistic evaluation carried out in the nineteenth century by Pott (1845) and Miklosich (1882–1888) showed that the Romani language is to be a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), establishing that the ancestors of the Romani could not have left India significantly earlier than AD 1000.
The principal argument favoring a migration during or after the transition period to NIA is the loss of the old system of nominal case, and its reduction to just a two-way case system, nominative vs. oblique. A secondary argument concerns the system of gender differentiation. Romani has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Middle Indo-Aryan languages (named MIA) generally had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and some modern Indo-Aryan languages retain this old system even today.
A long-standing common categorization was a division between the Vlax (from Vlach) from non-Vlax dialects. Vlax are those Roma people who lived many centuries in the territory of Romania in slavery. The main distinction between the two groups is the degree to which their vocabulary is borrowed from Romanian. Bernard Gilliath-Smith first made this distinction, and coined the term Vlax in 1915 in the book The Report on the Gypsy tribes of North East Bulgaria. The Vlax dialect group, now seen as just one of about ten groups (see below), has nevertheless become very widespread geographically.
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The Romani language is an important language worldwide. It is vital to understand the general nature and specific idiosyncrasies of Romani. For over 10 years Global Interpreting has provided outstanding Romani translators, over the phone, face to face and conference interpreters nation and worldwide.