Directed reading Fall 2014, supervised by Prof. Dr.

Jaffer Sheyholislami

The use of Romani language in the Internet

and the Roma identity.
Contents
The historical and sociological background.....................................................................................2
The language....................................................................................................................................3
The key definitions...........................................................................................................................4
Romani language & Roma identity: the state of debate...................................................................6
Roma and Romani: divided between the states................................................................................8
The research: the gap, the questions and the methodology............................................................10
The Romani Internet vs Romani Identity.......................................................................................11
Discussion.......................................................................................................................................14
Bibliography...................................................................................................................................15

Dmitry Lytov, MA student (2nd year)

ID 100957344
Carleton University

The historical and sociological background

The Roma people left India in the early Middle Ages, arrived to Europe a few centuries before
the Renaissance and eventually spread over it, with the largest concentration in Balkan states
(Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia). Most of them quickly adopted the Christian religion but
were unable to integrate fully into the European society. In fact, they were the second known historical
visible minority in Europe after the Jews; their appearance and customs were too different from their
environment and often made them target for persecutions, reprisals and even enslavement. During the
World War II many of them fell victims to mass deportations to extermination camps, commonly
known as the Holocaust (or kali trash, the black horror in Romani).
Up to date, they live in both Americas, Europe, Middle East and Central Asia. There is a common
clich in the folklore and literature that depicts them as constantly migrating people with no steady
place of living, which is rather not true in the modern times. There are groups migrating seasonally
around certain locations, while most of them have been permanently settled in certain areas for multiple
generations. Their mobility used to be much higher in the pre-industrial and early industrial times when
they as small traders and artisans created large networks of commerce and cultural exchange. The rise
of transport, large industry and national states in Europe resulted in their decline; their traditional
lifestyle was no longer competitive. While the public support of Romani civil rights, culture and
language has grown tremendously over the last two centuries, one cannot deny that the assimilation
trends among them are quite visible overall. Once a Roma moves to a non-Roma environment, (which
provides many more economic and social advantages than the native community does), he/she is lost
for the community within a generation and there is no reverse flow from non-Roma to Roma. The
largest Roma populations live in the USA (1 million) and Brazil (800,000), but in those both countries,
they are almost invisible, as there was no strong prejudice against them, nor were they as distinct,
compared to many other visible minorities absent in Europe.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

In Europe and on the post-Soviet space the problem of their integration still exists, and their
distinctness is undisputed. On the one hand, there are multiple distinct cultural and/or regional groups
within Roma with their own characteristic traits, including own dialects (and the existence of these
dialects indicates that those groups have been existing over many generations). On the other, there is
common understanding between Roma of their common identity across various countries of their
residence, which distinguishes them from the Gadjo (non-Roma). Part of their identity is their
language, known as Romani (that is, Roma-ish).

The language
Romani (Romany) is formally described as a heterogeneous cluster of varieties with a
homogeneous core... but without any generally accepted homogenizing standard, and its function is
primarily oral, with no monolingual speakers, no written standard, and no prescriptive norms
(Halwachs, 2012).
Native speakers of Romani are all bilingual or multilingual, and use Romani mostly for the
purpose of ethnic identification (distinguishing between Roma and Gadjo, that is, non-Roma), as well
as for discussing matters relevant to their particular community (Bakker & Kyuchukov, 2000; Leggio,
2011). Speakers of different dialects which are numerous prefer to switch to a mutually
comprehensible mainstream language, once they recognize each other as Roma (Friedman, 1996).
The necessity of studying Romani by non-Roma exists for various reasons: political and
administrative (support of minority languages, ethnic reconciliation policy in Europe, police
interpreting), educational, linguistic (studying of minority languages and their preservation) etc. While
Roma are reluctant to disclose their language to strangers, a great part of the Roma research has been
done by non-Roma, which even resulted in conflicting paradigms in Roma studies (the insiders and
outsiders perspectives). Canada is one of the worlds centers of modern Roma studies, with R. Lee
being the author of the most popular Romani textbook (Lee, 2005).

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

While a lot of research has been done on the dialects of Romani, its sociolinguistic aspects, and
the relation between the language and the Roma identity, the question of Romani acquisition seems to
be limited mostly to elementary and middle school pedagogy, and only about native Roma speakers.
My objective is to research and review the methods of Romani acquisition by non-Romani. My
hypothesis, based on my personal experience, is that digital media provide Romani learners with better
opportunities to learn Romani, and even allow bypassing (although not completely avoiding) the
question of being a Roma or a Gadjo at the initial stages of acquisition, so crucial to Roma.

The key definitions

The concept of identity has been largely used in numerous publications as self-evident, something
that does not need an explicit clarification. Edwards (2009, pp. 14-19) discusses various perspectives
on identity in general and finds that there is no common point of view; it has something to do with the
concept of oneself. Therefore, as Edwards proceeds, the meaning of identity becomes clearer in
narrower applications, such as personal vs. social identity. The ethnic and/or cultural identity of Roma
is definitely the latter case.
The concept of ethnic identity is often confused with the term ethnicity (Chandra, 2006, p. 398).
The reason for confusion, as Chandra further elaborates, is the non-distinction between the categories
of membership and the attributes that qualify individuals for membership in these groups. This may
imply, for example, that a group clearly exists in perception of external observers while internally its
members do not feel much attached to each other. The ethnic identity, according to him, is based on a
set of attributes that can apply in their entirety or not: the (mythical) common ancestry, religion,
history, culture, the descent rule, the conceptual autonomy. It is not necessary for all of those criteria
to apply to a particular ethnic group; it is necessary, however, that people belonging to this group had
common understanding of these features as theirs.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

Edwards speaks about the social identity, or group identity, in terms of socialization between the
group members (p. 20) and having certain group markers (p. 21), which often result in formation of an
idiolect (a generic term encompassing languages, dialects or even group slangs as distinguished from
similar ones outside the group).
Edwards caution in using the linguistic labels is quite understandable. There are many ethnic
groups that share their language with their neighbors and (former) rivals (Ireland Great Britain,
Germany Austria, Moldova Romania, etc.), or whose standard languages are perceived by
neighbours as varieties of their own (former Yugoslavian states, Rwanda Burundi). The case of
stateless ethnic groups is even more complicated, as these are often multilingual, with their primary
language of communication not necessarily being their own.
In terms of this debate we will also need some linguistic definitions.
Idiolect (Edwards, 2009, p. 21) particular combination of accent and dialect, assemblage of
formal and informal registers pattern of stress and intonation which we would find unique to an
individual. Edwards further elaborates that individuals are usually not particularly interesting for
large-scale research, but this term is equally applicable to group and social studies.
The language vs. dialect debate is well known for being endless and full of multiple nuances
when applied to particular situations. For practical reasons, Edwards defines a dialect as a variety of
language that differs from others along three dimensions: vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation (p.
63) while for the language he relies on classical definitions by Morris (1946, cited by Edwards, 2009,
p. 53) as a communication system composed of arbitrary elements which possess an agreed-upon
significance within a community. While there is a broad variation as to whether this or that idiolect
should be considered a language or a dialect, we can start from the other end: at which point a language
is no longer this but rather that. Whether or not it is related to the group identity, it is always
connected with the criterion of functionality, that is, whether this or that group is ready to accept this

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

language as theirs which in turn may have broadest implications in particular cases. Most Chinese
do not understand non-standard dialects, but they still consider them Chinese, as there is an umbrella
language, the standard Mandarin, being also their identity marker. On the other hand, there are multiple
varieties of English that are no longer associated with the British/English identity; their use in the
society (e.g. Canadian or Jamaican) simply depends on the fact whether they are mutually
understandable for collocutors in the English-speaking community in the broadest sense.
As we speak about standard language, we need its definition as well. Finegan (2007, p.14)
defines it as a variety of language used in the public discourse. In application to Roma, as we will
further see, this definition may be a bit controversial. As was said above, there is no standard Romani
language, nor even a commonly understandable dialect, apart from certain vocabulary and grammar
shared among Roma subgroups.

Romani language & Roma identity: the state of debate

The question of correlation between language and identity is debated in application to multiple
ethnic groups, and the Roma represent an interesting case. All of them are at least bilingual, in the
extreme case multilingual. As education in Romani became available only in the XX century, and still
represents rather a set of local initiatives than a widespread phenomenon, the Roma either did not
receive education at all or received it in local languages. They use the language of their environment
for everyday communication with non-Roma (who often outnumber them), and this is a significant
factor even when they spend most of their time within their community. While dictionaries of local
varieties of Romani may include tens of thousands of word units, regional borrowings render these
varieties poorly comprehensible to each other much more than the grammar or accent. The common
Romani vocabulary is confined to terms describing their traditional pre-industrial way of life;
everything that is beyond this scope is almost necessarily borrowed and makes it difficult for a
Hungarian Roma to understand his Romanian peer.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

Apart from this, there is large dialectal variability of Romani. The mutual intelligibility between
the dialects is a matter of debates; Matras (2005, 5-13) in his review of dialects is not discussing the
problem of intelligibility at all, and other reviews point out that there is certain difficulty
understanding each other between these dialects.
There are two principal groups of dialects, North-Western and South-Eastern. The principal
difference between these two is that the North-Western group moved away from Balkans quite early,
about a 500 years ago, and experienced influence of Germanic languages at the earlier stage, before
they dispersed over a vast area from Spain to Scandinavia and West Russia. The South-Eastern group
remained in Balkans or at least supported communication with Balkan groups of Roma for a longer
period (and the majority of South Roma still resides in Romania).
While the South-Eastern group of dialects retains certain degree of uniformity and mutual
comprehensibility, the dialects of the North group are losing (or sometimes completely lost) both
mutual intelligibility (due to higher degree of variation and influences of other languages) and that with
South dialects.
While the common vocabulary and grammar are valid criteria in the eyes of linguists as criteria
of definition of the Romani language, the speakers of Romani may look at it from a different
perspective. While there may be no comprehension between speakers of different dialects (e.g.
Kalderash and Northern Russian) living in the same area, they perceive themselves as Roma and
perceive their language(s) as Romani, as these distinguish them from their environment. It seems to be
just in the same way as Kurds speaking different dialects still distinguish themselves from non-Kurds,
whose linguistic and cultural difference are much more prominent than the variability of their
vocabulary and grammar (Sheyholislami, 2010).

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

Roma and Romani: divided between the states

Apart from dialectal variations, there is another problem that seems to have a great impact on the
Roma identity and our understanding of several key features of the Romani language. Roma are people
divided by state borders. In the pre-capitalist Europe, being a subject of a state was understood in terms
of being a vassal of a sovereign. There were sovereign rulers rather than nations. Languages played a
secondary role: the fact that rulers spoke a language different from that of the majority did not
embarrass them much. The French Revolution brought new understanding: peoples turned into nations,
they began to regard their countries as their own property rather than that of their rulers.
The Roma were an oppressed layer in the pre-capitalist model but the rise of national states in
XIX century made them losers. Just like Jews, they did not have their own national state, nor even a
territory that could be considered as definitely, unarguably theirs. What put them in a worse position
compared to Jews was the absence of a commonly respected heritage and tradition comparable to the
Bible and the Holy Land for Jews. They came out of nowhere (in XIX century many Europeans were
still unaware of their origin from India and attributed them Egyptian heritage, hence Gypsies), and
even when their Indian roots became known, there was no way back for them to India; Europe was
their (unhospitable) home, but India was not any longer (Tcherenkov & Laderich, 2004).
The nationalism growing towards the early 1900 brought the Roma to the involuntary choice of
being loyal citizens of this or that national state while many compatriots considered them too distinct
to be compatriots. All of this resulted in Roma pogroms, as well as the infamous Kali Trash (the Roma
Holocaust during the World War II).
The European nationalism had an important implication for the Romani language. Before the
XVIII century, it did not have any script, and Romani words and phrases were recorded only
occasionally. The new national states, in spite of all the xenophobia towards the Roma, developed a set
of rights that they considered to be natural and self-evident, and they granted them to Roma as well

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

(Tcherenkov & Laderich, 2004). Subsequently, the new civil rights exposed them more and more to the
formal settings of communication, including schools, offices, military service and the necessity to be
literate became imminent. Starting from XIX century there were multiple attempts to create Romani
writing. All of them, however, were based on national orthographies of European languages, which are
quite different from each other. Here are just a few examples how the same two sounds may be written
in different countries:
English

German

Polish

Hungarian

Czech,

Romanian

Russian,

Croatian,

Bulgarian,

Baltic

Serbian

Ss,

Sz

Sch

Sz

Sh

For the purpose of standardization linguists prefer to use the Serbian-based common Romani
alphabet (Gila-Kochanowsky, 2002; Lee, 2005); it is used, for example, in multiple textbooks
published in Balkan states (Romania, Serbia), as well as in textbooks of Romani. However, its main
drawback are the diacritics, which are not present on the standard Latin keyboard. For this reason, even
the Romani Wikipedia prefers to substitute diacritics with letter combinations, e.g. Sh instead of . This
common alphabet, however, as well as the attempts to create a common standard of Romani, is used
mostly by linguists outside the named states. Most books in Romani use orthographies based on
national standards of official languages of respective states, e.g., the books published on the post-Soviet
space use Cyrillic letters (see e.g. Toropov, 1994)
Given that the level of literacy among the Roma is generally lower than that of their environment,
one can expect that different national orthographies of Romani may create a major obstacle to
understanding between various groups of Roma, even when they use the same dialect (otherwise
intelligible when spoken).

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

The same problem seems to exist in Romani media. Apart from research centers specialized in
Roma studies, there are no all-Roma media, whether TV, radio, newspapers etc. the existing ones are
confined to the audience of national states.
Being a relatively new cross-border media, can the Internet solve this problem? How does the
Roma identity correlate with the use of the Romani language in the Internet?

The research: the gap, the questions and the methodology

The ethnic identity can be defined in terms of different markers. A language may be either a
functional or a symbolic identity marker, depending on the specifics of its use on Internet sites and in
online communication (in chats, blogs, social networks etc.).
In order to answer the principal question of the research, we will have to answer several
secondary questions leading to the key issue, namely:

What are Romani sites?

What language(s) is (are) their principal language(s)?
What part of the site content / forum discussions etc. is in Romani?
Is this a single or different Romani languages? Are people using national or dialectal
varieties of Romani?

Concerning Internet forums and chats, there are a few more questions peculiar to them:

How often and in what settings is Romani used?

How quickly and how often do people switch from Romani to national languages?

The methodology of our research is limited by the size of this essay: there is not much time
available for a research nor space on paper for its discussion. Therefore we decided to discuss
several available publications on Romani use in the Internet, as well as to share our own
observations in this regard.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

10

The Romani Internet vs Romani Identity

A great deal of observations filling the research gap were retrieved from two publications by
notable modern Romani researchers, Dietrich Halwachs and Viktor Leggio.
The two publications in question discuss the presence and the specifics of use of the Romani
language in the Internet, but in different ways. Halwachs offers an analytical approach by presenting a
general overview of Romani sociolinguistic situation, classifying Romani sites by group and analyzing
the extent of use of the language on them. Leggio, by contrast, is more specific in discussing particular
sites, as well as other research on the same problem. In addition, Leggios research focuses rather on
the Internet as a means of codification of the Romani language, while Halwachs is rather concerned
about the share of the Romani language on Roma-related sites.
Both publications (as well as many other researches of these two authors) were performed as part
of a common program of Manchester University (Great Britain) and Aarhus University (Denmark)
sponsored by the European Commission.
The focus point of Halwachs review is the dominated (as opposed to dominant) position of
Romani. He describes Romani as a heterogeneous cluster of varieties with a homogeneous core... But
without any generally accepted homogenising standard(p. 2). Its function is primarily oral, with no
monolingual speakers, no written standard, no prescriptive norms (p. 2).
Consequently, there are no monolingual web sites in Romani. All the sites considered in the
research are either bilingual or plurilingual. For all of these sites there is a general trend that most of the
information is presented in any language other than Romani, while the latter is used only to represent
translations of some materials, but is never used as the principal language of the site. In this sense,
Halwachs notices that the greater is the share of Gadjo (non-Roma) in creation of a site, the higher is
the percentage of Romani texts, as professional linguists are more likely to provide good translation of
texts than just native Romani speakers (p. 6).

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

11

Halwachs distinguishes 3 different types of Romani-related sites: 1) national and international

Romani NGOs, 2) other NGOs (non-Romani) that may use Romani for any purpose whatsoever, 3)
public and private Romani media. As a rule, international web sites use English as their primary
language (p. 5), and other NGO sites use the language of the country where they are located.
In web forums and discussion groups where native Roma are dominant, Romani phrases are often
used as an ethnic identity markers but the general discussion is conducted in other languages than
Romani (p. 7). This means, in particular, that Romani is currently unable to perform a function of a
cross-border language, at least in the Internet space. My personal impression from communication in
Romani forums is quite the same: their principal languages were Russian, Serbian, Czech etc., and they
sometimes contained topics titled lets learn (not forget) Romani, but that was the maximum they
could do.
Leggio, by contrast to Halwachs, analyzes specific Romani sites in order to research the problem
of the language codification and standardization. However, in course of researching the sites he notices
the same problems as mentioned by Halwachs, namely the use of other languages (mostly English) as
primary languages of the web sites, with Romani playing rather educative or symbolic functions.
While analyzing chat rooms (the sites where Romani is best represented compared to other types
of sites) Leggio notices frequent switching between Romani and other languages in communication on
the sites in question. The statistics presented on p. 20 is quite eloquent:
Language

% of total Salutations

Jokes

Exchanges

Face-saving

Nicknames

used
Romani

messages
65%

31%

48%

of news
84%

39%

15%

only
Romani and 9%

37%

45%

13%

38%

73%

other
Other only
Total

32%
100%

7%
100%

3%
100%

23%
100%

12%
100%

26%
100%

Table 1. Relationship between language choice and discursive function (Leggio, 2011, p.20).

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

12

At the conclusion Leggio notices the same trend as discussed by Halwachs: while linguists can
produce quite long and beautiful translations into Romani, lay Roma tend to use the Internet for
communicative purpose only and hardly try to reach outsiders. They always communicate in a
multilingual mode, and perform a hybrid identity among themselves (p. 21).
My understanding is that developing any Romani media, whether on the Internet or for
downloading, will have to tackle an important problem of Romas multiple identity. Apart from being
Roma, as opposed to non-Roma in general, they perceive themselves as Roma of a particular country
and community, and without this consideration any project related to Romani language will be useless.
On my own part I studied the use of Romani in social networks, such as Livejournal, Facebook,
Romani forums in the Internet. Initially, I performed a Google search for such expressions as Romani
language, Romani group, Romani forum etc. in several languages that I know (English, Russian,
Romani, Serbian etc.) As a result, I retrieved a few dozen web addresses of which less than ten were
completely functional. I abandoned sites and groups where discussions were discontinued for more
than a year, or where there were just a few members (apparently group founders). Then I abandoned
those where communication was performed in non-Romani languages, or which were dedicated purely
to studying of Romani (that is, to non-native speakers).
As a result, there were only two groups where I could see continued communication (up to 5-6
posts) completely in Romani, namely Nashata Romska kultura (Our Romani culture) and Romani
Language Rromani Chib, both in Facebook. Alas, even in these two groups communication tended
to shift to local languages (Bulgarian and Serbian, respectively) once collocutors recognized each other
as Roma (and therefore as trustful persons) by using Romani greetings and small talk questions and
answers.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

13

Discussion
Historically, there are two possible cases of a language serving as an ethnic identity marker. It
may be a functional tool being in active everyday use and thus providing connections between
community members. On the other hand, it may have symbolic value, a visible token of group identity
whose practical use is limited or sometimes even negligible.
While in everyday communication Romani may still remain a functional identity marker (this
question is beyond our research), its use in Internet communication is visibly characteristic for a
symbolic marker. Our research did not reveal any trends of shifting towards its use as a functional tool;
in fact, the number of sites researched does not provide valid statistics. However, I doubt that such a
shift may happen in the nearest future, as long as the issues discussed above are not resolved, such as
lack of a common script, a literary standard, lack of initiatives of cross-border communication in
Romani. In my future research I would like to pay closer attention to the apparent trend of increasing
splitting of Romani into varieties confined within administrative regions.

Lytov, D. The use of Romani language in the Internet and the Roma identity.

14

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