Romani people

• 1. Introduction

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  The Romani people have carried the same question for a thousand years: where do they come from? Linguistic scholars, geneticists, and historians have spent generations trying to answer it, and the evidence now points to a single, remarkable origin. The ancestors of the Romani left the Indian subcontinent around 1000 CE, most likely from the region of present-day Rajasthan, and began a westward journey that would eventually scatter their descendants across Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Today, with an estimated ten million Roma living in Europe alone, they constitute one of the continent's largest ethnic minorities. Yet they remain among the least understood. Their original name may derive from the Sanskrit word for a drummer, a member of the Doma caste of musicians and dancers who occupied a low-caste position in Indian society. The word they use for themselves, Rom, simply means "man" or "husband" in their language. The name the world gave them, Gypsy, is derived from a medieval European misunderstanding that they were Egyptians. How a people from Rajasthan came to be called Egyptians, and what happened to them in between, is a story of migration, survival, and centuries of persecution.

• 2. Roots in India

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  A genetic study published in December 2012 concluded that the Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago. That study found that more than 70 percent of Romani males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma, a striking marker of a tight founding population. A separate study from 2001 suggested a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group, with a single lineage accounting for almost one-third of Romani males across all populations. A 2004 study calculated that the Romani population was founded approximately 32 to 40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16 to 25 generations ago. Haplogroup H-M82, which is uncommon in Europe but present in the Indian subcontinent, accounts for approximately 60 percent of the Balkan Romani group. Linguistic analysis independently supports this picture. The linguist Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin for the Romani language, followed by a migration to the northwest of the subcontinent. The language shares patterns with northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina in its verb morphology, and preserves isoglosses with the central branch of Indo-Aryan languages. A number of Armenian-origin words in Romani indicate the ancestors of the Roma passed through Armenia before the 9th century, placing them somewhere between India and Europe during those centuries. The migration westward may have been connected to the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni, as soldiers and their families were pushed into the Byzantine Empire following military defeats.

• 3. A Language of Migrants

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  Romani belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages, and its grammatical structure bears the marks of every territory its speakers crossed. Persian, Armenian, Greek, and South Slavic elements are woven into the vocabulary alongside the Sanskrit core, creating a linguistic map of the journey west. The language is divided into several dialects, which together are estimated to have more than two million speakers, though a conservative estimate for Europe alone puts the number at 3.5 million, with a further 500,000 elsewhere. This makes Romani the second-largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan. Because Romani has traditionally been an oral language with no literary standard, many Roma became native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence, or speak mixed languages that combine a local tongue with Romani features, sometimes called para-Romani. The Gitanos of Spain speak Calo; the Romanichal of Britain speak Angloromani; the Romanisael of Scandinavia speak Scandoromani. All Romani speakers are bilingual, and the habit of borrowing from surrounding languages makes cross-dialect communication difficult. A Roma from one country may struggle to understand a Roma from another, which is why Romani is sometimes described as a collection of related languages rather than a single tongue. In Norway, the situation is so distinct that the term Romani is reserved exclusively for an older Northern Romani-speaking population that arrived in the 16th century, while the name Romanes is used for Vlax-speaking groups who migrated in the 19th century.

• 4. Names and Misnames

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  In 1971, the attendees of the first World Romani Congress voted unanimously to reject all exonyms for the Romani people, including Gypsy. That vote reflected centuries of frustration with a name built on a medieval mistake. The English word 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 share the same etymology, ultimately derived from the Greek Aigyptioi, meaning Egyptian. A parallel misidentification produced the name Tsigani, used widely in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans, which likely traces back to the Athinganoi, a Manichaean Christian sect who lived in Phrygia and Lycaonia and with whom the Roma were confused in the Byzantine period. The word Bohemian entered European languages because the Roma from Bohemia were thought to have originated there; when they arrived in France in the 16th century, they were called bohemiens. That term eventually passed into the wider language as a word for free-spirited, artistic people, and the Romani nomadic lifestyle inspired the 19th-century European Bohemianism movement and, later, the hippie movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word Rom itself to the Sanskrit dhomba, meaning a lower-caste person working as a wandering musician, derived from a Dravidian word for a caste of acrobats and jugglers. Today, the United Nations and the US Library of Congress use the term Romani, while the Council of Europe recommends Roma as the term for all related groups.

• 5. Arrival and Reception in Europe

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  In 1322, an Irish Franciscan friar named Symon Semeonis was traveling from Ireland toward Jerusalem when, outside the town of Candia on the island of Crete, he encountered a migrant group he called "the descendants of Cain." His account is the earliest surviving description by a western chronicler of the Roma in Europe. In 1350, Ludolph of Saxony mentioned a similar people who spoke a unique language and whom he called Mandapolos, possibly derived from the Greek word for prophet or fortune teller. By the 1440s, Roma were recorded in Germany; by the 16th century, they had reached Scotland and Sweden. As they spread west, they often traveled as pilgrims, moving in organized groups of between 40 and 200 people. The reception was sharply divided. Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund issued the Roma a safe conduct document in 1417. But expulsion orders came quickly: Roma were expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, from Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, and England in 1530. From 1510, any Rom found in Switzerland was subject to execution. In England from 1554 and Denmark from 1589, any Rom who did not leave within a month faced the same penalty. Portugal began deporting Roma to its colonies in 1538. Around Corfu in approximately 1360, a feudal structure called the Feudum Acinganorum was established using mainly Romani serfs. The first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in Wallachia dates to 1385, a documentation that marks the beginning of a formalized system of bondage that would last nearly five centuries.

• 6. Slavery and Persecution

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  Romani slavery in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia operated under legislation that classified all Roma living in those territories, as well as any who immigrated there, as slaves. The origins of this system are debated. Historian Nicolae Iorga connected the Roma's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion and argued that the Romanians took Roma from the Mongols, preserving their slave status. Others suggest the Roma were enslaved during battles with the Tatars. Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s. Elsewhere in Europe, persecution took different forms. After the Franco-Dutch War in the latter part of the 17th century, Roma were slaughtered throughout the Dutch Republic; the Dutch called them heiden, meaning heathens, and conducted organized Heidenjachten, or heathen hunts, across rural areas. In France, Roma were branded and had their heads shaved. In Moravia and Bohemia, Romani women were marked by having their ears severed. In Spain, King Carlos III enacted a Great Gypsy Roundup on the 30th of July 1749, ordering a nationwide raid that resulted in all able-bodied men being interned in forced labor camps. The measure was eventually reversed. Under Maria Theresa in the Habsburg monarchy between 1740 and 1780, decrees stripped Roma of horse and wagon ownership, renamed them "New Citizens", and prohibited marriages between Romani. Her successor Josef II banned traditional Romani clothing and the Romani language, both punishable by flogging. In 1880, Argentina prohibited Romani immigration on a racial basis, and the United States followed in 1885. In the 20th century, Norway passed a law in 1896 permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions; roughly 1,500 Romani children were taken from their families as a result.

• 7. The Porajmos

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  In 1935, Roma living in Germany were stripped of citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws and subjected to violence and imprisonment in concentration camps. From 1942, the policy escalated to genocide in extermination camps. The Romani word for this catastrophe is the Porajmos. Estimates of the total number of Roma killed range from 90,000 to as high as 4,000,000; the majority of scholarly estimates fall between 200,000 and 500,000. Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist, a precise count remains impossible. A detailed study by Sybil Milton addressed the scale of the killings, though the lower estimates are understood to exclude Roma killed across all Axis-controlled countries. In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustasha killed almost the entire Romani population of 25,000. The Jasenovac concentration camp system, run by the Ustasha militia and the Croatian political police, was responsible for between 15,000 and 20,000 Romani deaths. Roma were also killed on sight, particularly by the Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads on the Eastern Front. After the war, persecution continued in different forms. In Czechoslovakia, Romani women were sterilized under a state policy to reduce the Romani population, implemented through financial incentives, threats of denied welfare payments, misinformation, or drugs. A Czech government report from December 2005 confirmed that Communist authorities had practiced an assimilation policy that included efforts to control birth rates in the Romani community. New cases of illegal sterilization were still being revealed as late as 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

• 8. Music, Culture, and Identity

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  The Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra was Romani, as were the musicians behind the lautari tradition at traditional Romanian weddings, virtually all of them Roma. Romani musicians have shaped European classical music through their influence on composers including Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. In Bulgaria, the popular wedding music genre is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians; Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist, is closely associated with it. In Spain, the Roma shaped the flamenco tradition, including the style known as cante jondo. Antonio Cansino blended Romani and Spanish flamenco and is credited with creating modern-day Spanish dance. His granddaughter is the actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. The guitar tradition of gypsy jazz, known in French as jazz Manouche or Sinti jazz, was shaped by Django Reinhardt, who acknowledged the artform's Romani roots. Contemporary players in this tradition include Stochelo Rosenberg, Bireli Lagrene, Jimmy Rosenberg, and Tchavolo Schmitt. The Romani concept of Romanipen refers to the totality of Romani spirit, culture, and law, meaning being Romani in its fullest sense. An ethnic Rom who has no Romanipen may be considered a gadjo, an outsider, in Romani society; conversely, a non-Rom who genuinely embodies Romanipen may be considered Rom. Romani folklore includes the paramichia tradition of legends and folktales; among the Vlach Roma, a hero called Mundro Salamon, known to other subgroups as Wise Solomon, is a central figure. In March 1976, India's then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi received the Roma at the International Roma Cultural Festival in Chandigarh and described them as part of the global Indian diaspora, a symbolic connection that Romani advocates have continued to pursue in international forums.