Romani writing systems
Encyclopedia
The Romani language
has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although the first example of written Romani dates from 1542, it is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by native Romani people arose.
Written Romani in the 20th century used the writing systems of their respective host societies, mostly Latin-derived scripts (Romanian
, Czech
, Croatian
, etc.).
In an effort to overcome this, during the 1980s and 1990s Marcel Courthiade proposed a model for orthographic unification based on the adoption of a meta-phonological orthography, which "would allow dialectal variation to be accommodated at the phonological and morpho-phonological level". This system was presented to the International Romani Union
in 1990, who adopted it as the organisation's "official alphabet". This recognition by the International Romani Union allowed Courthiade's system to qualify for funding from the European Commission
.
Despite being used in several publications, such as the grammar of Romani compiled by Gheorghe Sarău and the Polish publication Informaciaqo lil, the IRU standard has yet to find a broad base of support from Romani writers. One reason for the reluctance to adopt this standard, according to Canadian Rom Ronald Lee, is that the proposed orthography contains a number of specialised characters not regularly found on European keyboards, such as θ and ʒ.
Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian
in Romania
, Hungarian
in Hungary
and so on. A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.
Descriptive linguistics
has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription. Despite small differences between individual linguists in the representation of certain phonemes, most adhere to a system which Hancock terms Pan-Vlax.
terms Pan-Vlax will likely be used. This orthography is not a single standardised form, but rather a set of orthographical practices which exhibit a basic "core" of shared graphemes and a small amount of divergence in several areas. The Pan-Vlax script is based on the Latin script, augmented by the addition of several diacritic
s common to the languages of eastern Europe, such as the caron
.
In the following table, the most common variants of the graphemes are shown. The phonemes used in the table are somewhat arbitrary and are not specifically based on any one current dialect (for example, the phoneme denoted /dʒ/ in the table can be realised as /ʒ/, /ʐ/ or /ɟ/, depending on dialect):
The use of the above graphemes is relatively stable and universal, taking into account dialectal mergers and so on. However, in certain areas there is somewhat more variation. A typically diverse area is in the representation of sounds not present in most varieties of Romani. For example, the centralised vowel phonemes of several varieties of Vlax and Xaladitka, when they are indicated separately from the non-centralised vowels, can be represented using ə, ъ or ă. Another particularly variant area is the representation of palatalised consonants, which are absent from a number of dialects. Some variant graphemes for /tʲ/ include tj, ty, ć, čj and t᾿. Finally, the representation of the phoneme /ɻ/ (the reflex of the Sanskrit retroflex series), which in several dialects has been merged with /r/, tends to vary between rr, ř and rh, and sometimes even gh, with the first two being the most frequently found variants.
s with acute accent
s, transforming č š ž into ć ś ź. However, its most distinctive feature is the use of "meta-notations", which are intended to cover cross-dialectal phonological variation, particularly in degrees of palatalisation; and "morpho-graphs", which are used to represent the morphophonological alternation of case suffixes in different phonological environments.
The three "morpho-graphs" are ç, q and θ, which are used to represent the initial phonemes of a number of case suffixes, which are realised /s/, /k/ and /t/ after a vowel
and /ts/, /ɡ/ and /d/ after a nasal consonant
. The three "meta-notations" are ʒ, ŏ and ă, the realisation of which varies by dialect. The latter two, for example, are pronounced /o/ and /a/ in Lovaricka, but /jo/ and /ja/ in Kalderash
.
.
Cyrillic alphabet of Ruska Roma's dialect
, for instance, Romani is mostly written with the Greek alphabet (although very little seems to be written in Romani in Greece). The Arabic script has also been used, for example, in Iran
. More importantly, the first periodical produced by Roma for Roma was printed in the Arabic script in the 1920s in Edirne
in Turkey
. It was called "Laćo" which means "good". In addition, other scripts have been proposed for cultural reasons but have been in use to a marginal extent only: according to Ian Hancock
, "constructed, non-Latin alphabets for Romani, such as the one devised by Andrzej Mirga on an Indian model, or actual Devanagari
(Indian)-based systems, which have occasionally been used, are of academic interest only, but do reflect an awareness of Romani’s historical Asian connection".
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....
has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although the first example of written Romani dates from 1542, it is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by native Romani people arose.
Written Romani in the 20th century used the writing systems of their respective host societies, mostly Latin-derived scripts (Romanian
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters:The letters Q , W , and Y were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier...
, Czech
Czech alphabet
The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin script, used when writing Czech. Its basic principles are "one sound, one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin...
, Croatian
Croatian alphabet
Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin script used for Croatian language. It was devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835, based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet....
, etc.).
Standardisation
Currently there is no one single standard orthography used by both scholars and native speakers. Efforts of language planners have been hampered by the significant dialectal divisions in Romani: the absence of a standard phonology in turn makes the selection of a single written form problematic.In an effort to overcome this, during the 1980s and 1990s Marcel Courthiade proposed a model for orthographic unification based on the adoption of a meta-phonological orthography, which "would allow dialectal variation to be accommodated at the phonological and morpho-phonological level". This system was presented to the International Romani Union
International Romani Union
The International Romani Union is an organization active for the rights of the Romani people. Its seat is in Prague....
in 1990, who adopted it as the organisation's "official alphabet". This recognition by the International Romani Union allowed Courthiade's system to qualify for funding from the European Commission
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
.
Despite being used in several publications, such as the grammar of Romani compiled by Gheorghe Sarău and the Polish publication Informaciaqo lil, the IRU standard has yet to find a broad base of support from Romani writers. One reason for the reluctance to adopt this standard, according to Canadian Rom Ronald Lee, is that the proposed orthography contains a number of specialised characters not regularly found on European keyboards, such as θ and ʒ.
Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
in Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
in Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
and so on. A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.
Descriptive linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription. Despite small differences between individual linguists in the representation of certain phonemes, most adhere to a system which Hancock terms Pan-Vlax.
Systems currently in use
The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography. There are three main systems which are likely to be encountered: the Pan-Vlax system, the International Standard and various Anglicised systems.Pan-Vlax
In most recent descriptive literature, a variety of the orthography which Ian HancockIan Hancock
Ian Hancock is a linguist, Romani scholar, and political advocate. He was born and raised in England, and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies....
terms Pan-Vlax will likely be used. This orthography is not a single standardised form, but rather a set of orthographical practices which exhibit a basic "core" of shared graphemes and a small amount of divergence in several areas. The Pan-Vlax script is based on the Latin script, augmented by the addition of several diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s common to the languages of eastern Europe, such as the caron
Caron
A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
.
In the following table, the most common variants of the graphemes are shown. The phonemes used in the table are somewhat arbitrary and are not specifically based on any one current dialect (for example, the phoneme denoted /dʒ/ in the table can be realised as /ʒ/, /ʐ/ or /ɟ/, depending on dialect):
| Grapheme | Phoneme | Example |
|---|---|---|
| A a | /a/ | akana now |
| B b | /b/ | barvalo rich |
| C c | /ts/ | cirdel he pulls |
| Č č | /tʃ/ | čačo true |
| Čh čh | /tʃʰ/ | čhavo boy |
| D d | /d/ | dorjav river |
| Dž dž | /dʒ/ | džukel dog |
| E e | /e/ | ertimos forgiveness |
| F f | /f/ | foros town |
| G g | /ɡ/ | gadže non-Rom |
| H h | /h/ | harmasari stallion |
| I i | /i/ | ičarel he crushes |
| J j | /j/ | jag fire |
| K k | /k/ | kaj where |
| Kh kh | /kʰ/ | khamesko sunny |
| L l | /l/ | lašo good |
| M m | /m/ | manuš man |
| N n | /n/ | nav name |
| O o | /o/ | oxto eight |
| P p | /p/ | pekel he bakes |
| Ph ph | /pʰ/ | phabaj apple |
| R r | /r/ | rakli girl |
| S s | /s/ | sunakaj gold |
| Š š | /ʃ/ | šukar sweet/good/nice |
| T t | /t/ | taxtaj cup |
| Th th | /tʰ/ | them land |
| U u | /u/ | uš lip |
| V v | /ʋ/ | voro cousin |
| X x | /x/ | xarano wise |
| Z z | /z/ | zeleno green |
| Ž ž | /ʒ/ | žoja Thursday |
The use of the above graphemes is relatively stable and universal, taking into account dialectal mergers and so on. However, in certain areas there is somewhat more variation. A typically diverse area is in the representation of sounds not present in most varieties of Romani. For example, the centralised vowel phonemes of several varieties of Vlax and Xaladitka, when they are indicated separately from the non-centralised vowels, can be represented using ə, ъ or ă. Another particularly variant area is the representation of palatalised consonants, which are absent from a number of dialects. Some variant graphemes for /tʲ/ include tj, ty, ć, čj and t᾿. Finally, the representation of the phoneme /ɻ/ (the reflex of the Sanskrit retroflex series), which in several dialects has been merged with /r/, tends to vary between rr, ř and rh, and sometimes even gh, with the first two being the most frequently found variants.
International Standard
The International Standard orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade and adopted by the International Romani Union, uses similar conventions to the Pan-Vlax system outlined above. Several of the differences are simply graphical, such as replacing caronCaron
A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
s with acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
s, transforming č š ž into ć ś ź. However, its most distinctive feature is the use of "meta-notations", which are intended to cover cross-dialectal phonological variation, particularly in degrees of palatalisation; and "morpho-graphs", which are used to represent the morphophonological alternation of case suffixes in different phonological environments.
The three "morpho-graphs" are ç, q and θ, which are used to represent the initial phonemes of a number of case suffixes, which are realised /s/, /k/ and /t/ after a vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
and /ts/, /ɡ/ and /d/ after a nasal consonant
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
. The three "meta-notations" are ʒ, ŏ and ă, the realisation of which varies by dialect. The latter two, for example, are pronounced /o/ and /a/ in Lovaricka, but /jo/ and /ja/ in Kalderash
Kalderash
The Kalderash are a subgroup of the Romani people, from the Roma meta-group. They were traditionally smiths and metal workers and speak a number of Romani dialects grouped together under the term Kalderash Romani, a sub-group of Vlax Romani.-Etymology:The name Kalderash The Kalderash (also spelled...
.
Anglicised
The English-based orthography commonly used in North America is, to a degree, an accommodation of the Pan-Vlax orthography to English-language keyboards, replacing those graphemes with diacritics with digraphs, such as the substitution of ts ch sh zh for c č š ž. This particular orthography seems to have arisen spontaneously as Romani speakers have communicated using email, a medium in which graphemes outside the Latin-1 charset have until recently been difficult to type. In addition, it is this orthography which is recommended for use by Romani scholar and activist Ronald LeeRonald Lee
----Ronald Lee is a Canadian Romani writer, linguist and activist.-Childhood and Youth:Lee's father was a Kalderash musician from Europe. He emigrated to Canada where he got married, taking his wife's surname, Lee....
.
Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet of Kalderash dialect| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Ғ ғ | Д д | Е е | Ё ё | Ж ж |
| З з | И и | Й й | К к | Кх кх | Л л | М м | Н н | О о |
| П п | Пх пх | Р р | Рр рр | С с | Т т | Тх тх | У у | Ф ф |
| Х х | Ц ц | Ч ч | Ш ш | Ы ы | Ь ь | Э э | Ю ю | Я я |
Cyrillic alphabet of Ruska Roma's dialect
| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Ґ ґ | Д д | Е е | Ё ё |
| Ж ж | З з | И и | Й й | К к | Л л | М м | Н н |
| О о | П п | Р р | С с | Т т | У у | Ф ф | Х х |
| Ц ц | Ч ч | Ш ш | Ы ы | Ь ь | Э э | Ю ю | Я я |
Other writing systems
Besides Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, other scripts have been used or proposed for writing Romani. In GreeceGreece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
, for instance, Romani is mostly written with the Greek alphabet (although very little seems to be written in Romani in Greece). The Arabic script has also been used, for example, in Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
. More importantly, the first periodical produced by Roma for Roma was printed in the Arabic script in the 1920s in Edirne
Edirne
Edirne is a city in Eastern Thrace, the northwestern part of Turkey, close to the borders with Greece and Bulgaria. Edirne served as the capital city of the Ottoman Empire from 1365 to 1453, before Constantinople became the empire's new capital. At present, Edirne is the capital of the Edirne...
in Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
. It was called "Laćo" which means "good". In addition, other scripts have been proposed for cultural reasons but have been in use to a marginal extent only: according to Ian Hancock
Ian Hancock
Ian Hancock is a linguist, Romani scholar, and political advocate. He was born and raised in England, and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies....
, "constructed, non-Latin alphabets for Romani, such as the one devised by Andrzej Mirga on an Indian model, or actual Devanagari
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
(Indian)-based systems, which have occasionally been used, are of academic interest only, but do reflect an awareness of Romani’s historical Asian connection".
External links
- Projects/romani/downloads/2/Matras_Pluralism.pdf The Future of Romani: Towards Linguistic Pluralism, Matras, Y
- Variants of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets
- Romani Latin alphabet and proposition for a Romani Devanagari alphabet
- Romano-Glossar. Gesammelt von Schir-ali Tehranizade, GLS 46, (1996) S. 31-59. © by the author DJONEDI, Fereydun (in German)