Short answers, pulled from the story.
Genetic and linguistic evidence shows that the Romani people originated in the northwestern regions of the Indian subcontinent, particularly present-day Rajasthan and Punjab. A 2012 genomic study concluded that they came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago and reached the Balkans roughly 900 years ago.
Gypsy derives from the Middle English gypcian, a shortened form of Egipcien, because medieval Europeans believed the Roma were wandering Egyptians. The Spanish Gitano and French Gitan have the same etymology, both ultimately derived from the Greek Aigyptioi, meaning Egyptian.
As of 2019, there were an estimated ten million Roma in Europe, though some Romani organizations have given earlier estimates as high as fourteen million. Within the European Union alone, there are an estimated six million Roma.
The Porajmos is the Romani word for the genocide carried out against the Roma by Nazi Germany during World War II. Estimates of the death toll range from 90,000 to as high as 4,000,000, with a majority of scholarly estimates falling between 200,000 and 500,000. In the Independent State of Croatia alone, the Ustasha killed almost the entire Romani population of 25,000.
Romani is an Indo-Aryan language with roots in present-day India, carrying strong influence from Persian, Armenian, Greek, and South Slavic. It has an estimated 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere, making it the second-largest minority language in Europe after Catalan.
The Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra was Romani, as was guitarist Django Reinhardt, who shaped the gypsy jazz tradition. Antonio Cansino, credited with creating modern-day Spanish dance by blending Romani and Spanish flamenco, was the grandfather of actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. Romani musicians also influenced composers Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms.