Angloromani language


Angloromani or Anglo-Romani is a mixed language involving the presence of Romani vocabulary and syntax in the English used by descendants of Romanichal Travellers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States, and South Africa.
After their arrival to Great Britain in the sixteenth century, Romani used the Romani language until the late nineteenth century. It was replaced by English as the everyday and family language of British Romani, leading to what is known as "Para-Romani" or the presence of Romani features in the English used by the Romani.
An example of a phrase in Angloromani is:
The mush was jalling down the drom with his gry
This differs from the presence of loanwords from the Romani language, such as ' , ', and .

Historical documentation of English Romani

A document from about the seventeenth century titled the Winchester Confessions indicates that British Romani was itself a dialect of the northern branch of Romani sharing a close similarity to Welsh Romani. However, the language in a modern context has changed from the Indic-based vocabulary, morphology, and influences from Greek and other Balkan languages of the seventeenth century to a Para-Romani dialect typical of modern Anglo-Romani with sentence endings influenced by English, while Welsh Romani retains the original grammatical system.
Historically, the variants of Welsh and English Romani constituted the same variant of Romani, share characteristics, and are historically closely related to dialects spoken in France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, Poland, North Russia and the Baltic states. Such dialects are descended from the first wave of Romani immigrants into western, northern and southern Europe in the late Middle Ages. Few documents survive into modern times, the Winchester Confessions document c.1616 highlights the variant of English Romani and contains a high number of words still used in the modern Northern European Romani dialects and until recently also Welsh Romani; Examples include: balovas, lovina, ruk, smentena, boba and folaso, and all such words occur in all western dialects of Romani, with few English loanwords present.
However, the Winchester Confessions document indicates that English grammatical structures were influencing speakers of English Romani to adopt an configuration rather than the configuration of other Romani dialects, including modern Welsh Romani. The document suggests a complete separation between Thieves' Cant, and the variant of English Romani of the early seventeenth century. This has particular implications when dating the origin and development of Anglo-Romani and its split from Welsh Romani. The author of one such study believes English Romani gradually lost its distinctive syntax, phonology and morphology while other scholars believe Anglo-Romani developed relatively quickly after the Romanis' arrival in England in the sixteenth century, in a development similar to the Pidgin or Creole languages.
Anglo-Romani was already developing in the seventeenth century although the change from the original English Romani is unclear. The Winchester Confessions document disproves a sudden morphological change, and lends support to a strict linguistic separation between a Canting language and English Romani whose speakers used a separate and distinct Romani language when speaking amongst themselves. A situation which existed one hundred years later as testified by James Poulter 1775: "the English Gypsies spoke a variant of their own language that none other could understand," indicating the language was distinct from the common "Canting tongue" of England. Romani of that time was a language of everyday communication, of practical use, and not a secret language.
The original Romani was used exclusively as a family or clan language, during occasional encounters between various Romani clans. It was not a written language, but more a conversational one, used by families to keep conversations amongst themselves in public places such as markets unintelligible to others. It was not used in any official capacity in schools or administrative matters, and so lacked the vocabulary for these terms. Such terms were simply borrowed from English. However, to keep the language undecipherable to outsiders, the Romani speakers coined new terms that were a combination or variation of the original English terms. For example, a forester is called veshengro, from the Romani word for forest, vesh; a restaurant is a habbinkerr from the words habbin, food, and kerr, house, thus literally "food-house"; and a mayor is a gavmoosh, from the words gav, village, town, and moosh, man, literally "town-man". Gradually, the British Romani began to give up their language in favour of English, though they retained much of the vocabulary, which they now use occasionally in English conversation – as Angloromani.
The origins of the Romani language are in India, and the core of the vocabulary and grammar still resemble modern Indic languages like Urdu, Kashmiri, and Punjabi. Linguists have been investigating the dialects of Romani since the second half of the eighteenth century, and although there are no ancient written records of the language, it has been possible to reconstruct the development of Romani from the medieval languages of India to its present forms as spoken in Europe. Although the language remains similar at its core, it is sometimes quite difficult for Romani people from different regions to understand one another if they have not had any exposure to other dialects before.

Intertwining

Anglo-Romani is a mixed language, with the base languages being Romani and English.
Some English lexical items that are archaic or only used in idiomatic expressions in Standard English survive in Anglo-Romani, for example moniker and swaddling.
Every region where Angloromani is spoken is characterised by a distinct colloquial English style; this often leads outsiders to believe that the speech of Romanichals is regional English. The distinct rhotic pronunciation of the Southern Angloromani variety also means that many outsiders perceive Southern Romanichal Travellers to be from the West Country because West Country English is also rhotic. Indeed, many Romanichal Travellers from the South of England or the Midlands region have a slightly West Country sounding accent; in fact it is a Southern Romanichal Traveller accent.

Dialectal variation

Among Anglo-Romani speakers, there is variation depending on where groups originally settled before learning English:
The members of these groups consider that not only do their dialects/accents differ, but also that they are of different regional groups. The speakers of Southern Angloromani took the regional identity of Southern Romanichal Travellers and the speakers of Northern Angloromani took the regional identity of Northern Romanichal Travellers. At the time of settlement, these divisions were somewhat reflective of geographic location. They did travel, but until travel became modernized, the migrations were relatively local.

Phonology and syntax

Overall, Anglo-Romani consonants reflect the standard British English consonantal system with the exception that the rhotic is trilled and /x/ appears in certain dialects. Anglo-Romani may sometimes be rhotic and in other cases is non-rhotic like English non-rhotic dialects; for example, in Romani terno "young" can be rendered as tawno.
Romani allowed for two word orders – Subject-Verb-Object and Verb-Subject-Object.
Negation in Anglo-Romani is achieved through the use of the word kek:
"Be" is optionally deleted:
Reduplication is employed for emphasis:
In the sixteenth century, the Romani language was an inflected language, employing two genders, plurality and case marking. Anglo-Romani is first referenced in 1566–1567. In the late nineteenth century, Romani personal pronouns became inconsistently marked, according to Leland, who also notes that case distinction began fading overall, and gender marking also disappeared. George Borrow notes that in 1874, some Romani speakers were still employing complete inflection, while some were adopting the English syntax with a Romani lexicon. It seems to be around 1876 that gender distinction was no longer seen; however, the continued use of Romani plural forms was noted, along with English verb conjugation. By 1923, some plural endings were still being used on nouns, but English prepositions were used instead of Romani postpositions. Current usage has lost almost all Romani morphology and instead uses English morphology with Romani lexical items.

Samples of Angloromani

The Anglo-Romani Project, an initiative of the Romani community of Blackburn and the Lancashire Traveller Education Service, has samples of Anglo-Romani conversation as well as documentation, which it has collected with the aim of documenting the Anglo-Romani lexicon in its regional and dialectal variation. Samples of conversation and their meaning can be found here:

Some common phrases

sample text, with English elements in italics:
;Comparison of Angloromani, European Romani, Indic languages and Slang English
AngloromaniEuropean RomaniEnglishIndic languagesSlang English
ChavChavoChild, Son, Boy Bacha to Vacha Chav
LollipobbulLaliphabaiToffee Apple Lal Seb Lollipop
GavverGavengroPoliceman Gavaandi Gaffer
JibChibLanguage/TongueJeebGibber

The Bible in Romany

The first published samples of the Bible in Romany were translated by Wester Boswell and published in 1875. Sylvester "Wester" Boswell was an English Gypsy who spoke Romanes. In the 1870s he translated some Scripture selections into English. These were published as "Genuine Romany Compositions" on pages 226-235 of a book called the "Dialect of the English Gypsies" by Bath C. Smart and Henry Thomas Crofton. The book was compiled in 1874 and published in London in 1875. In the Romany compositions, the words were written down using an orthography developed by A. J. Ellis which was used by the English Dialect Society, and they adopted the Greek letter χ to represent the sound being nearly that of ch in German or Welsh. The parts of Romanes which were English borrowings were italicised.
In 1973 the British and Foreign Bible Society produced a leaflet called Shavved and the Got Latchered, and then in 1979 produced "A Kushti Lav " and in 1981 "More Kuchti Lavs" which were selected passages from the New Testament. Later Scripture Gift Mission now called SGM Lifewords produced "The Kushti Bokkengro " in 1985 and another booklet called "The Drom " in 1995. These were selected passages from the Bible.
There is no complete book of the Bible in Romany, but some of these items can now be found online on www.youversion.com listed under "Romany: Angloromani".

Swadesh list