ROMANI

ROMANI, also Romany.
1. A member of the Romani community, c.6–10m worldwide
.
2. The originally Indo-Aryan language of the Gypsies, whose c.60 dialects vary greatly because of the community's wide dispersal and the impact of such languages as Persian, Greek, Hungarian, and English in places where Gypsies live or have lived. Most of the estimated 250,000 speakers of Romani are at least bilingual. In recent years, efforts have been made to create a standard written form for this largely non-literate language, in part so as to promote a stronger sense of ethnic identity among the Rom people. In Britain, there is a continuum of usage from a conservative inflected form called Romnimos, spoken by some 500 people mainly in Wales, to Anglo-Romani, Angloromani, Anglo-Romany, or Romani English, spoken by some 80,000 around the country, not all of them ethnic Gypsies. Anglo-Romani may contain more Romnimos or more English, depending on circumstances, and has often been regarded as a Travellers' argot. An excerpt from the New Testament in Anglo-Romani runs:
There was a rich mush with kushti-dicking purple togs. Every divvus his hobben was kushti. By his jigger suttied a poor mush called Lazarus. Lazarus dicked wafedi, riffly as a juk. He was ready to scran anything he could get his vasters on or kur it from the rich mush's table (The Gospel According to Luke, 16: 19–21, in More Kushti Lavs, the Bible Society, 1981) [mush man, kushti good, dick look, divvus day, hobben food, jigger door, sutty sleep, wafedi bad, riffly dirty, juk dog, scran eat, vaster hand, kur steal, lavs news].

Words from Romani borrowed into English tend to be slangy or informal; they include mush (‘moosh’: BrE slang) a friend, buddy, nark a (police) informer or spy (from nāk nose), and pal a friend. See BORROWING, COCKNEY, POLARI, SHELTA.