In I Met Lucky People, Yaron Matras, the world's leading authority on the Romani, explains why we need to reconsider how we view their culture. Who are the Romani people? As one of the last remaining societies in the Western hemisphere with a strictly oral culture, they have no written record of the[...]
Romani is a language of Indo-Aryan origin which is spoken in Europe by the people known as 'Gypsies' (who usually refer to themselves as Rom). There are upwards of 3.5 million speakers, and their language has attracted increasing interest both from scholars and from policy-makers in governments and [...]
An introduction to language contact, which occurs when speakers of different languages interact and their languages influence each other.[...]
Gypsies have lived among Europeans since the Middle Ages. Yet Roms still seem exotic to Westerners, who often rely on fictional depictions for what they know, or think"they know, about this much-misunderstood people. The Romani Gypsies" challenges stereotypes that have long been the unwelcome travel[...]