42 Facts About Romani people

Romani people, colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants.

At the first World Romani Congress in 1971, its attendees unanimously voted to reject the use of all exonyms for the Romani people, including Gypsy, due to their aforementioned negative and stereotypical connotations.

The Romani people arrived in West Asia and Europe around the 14th century.

Brazil includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition.

In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani people have moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.

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Romani people is an Indo-Aryan language with strong Balkan and Greek influence.

Significant Romani people populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine.

Roma Romani people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier.

Romani people are mainly called ciganos by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians.

Many Romani people refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination.

Significant Romani people populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine.

The total number of Romani people living outside Europe are primarily in the Middle East and North Africa and in the Americas and are estimated in total at more than two million.

Romani people identify as distinct ethnicities based in part on territorial, cultural and dialectal differences, and self-designation.

In regards to verb morphology, Romani people follows exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India.

Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani people originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group.

Ottoman occupation of the Balkans left a significant genetic mark on the Y-DNA of Romani people; creating a higher frequency of the haplogroups J and E3b in Roma populations from the region.

Full genome autosomal DNA study on 186 Roma samples from Europe in 2019 found that modern Roma Romani people are characterized by both deep South Asian and West Eurasian genetic ancestry.

The author Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin of Romani people followed by a migration to Northwest India as it shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan.

The overall morphology suggests that Romani people participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani people did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.

Romani people is the feminine adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective.

Romani people was sometimes spelled Rommany, but more often Romany, while today Romani people is the most popular spelling.

Today, the term Romani people is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.

Some Romani people migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.

From 1510 onwards, any Romani people found in Switzerland were to be executed; while in England and Denmark any Romani people which did not leave within a month were to be executed.

In England, Romani people were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed.

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Romani people began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small groups recorded in Virginia and French Louisiana.

In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum", and Romani people women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population.

Romani people law establishes that the man's family must pay a bride price to the bride's parents, but only traditional families still follow it.

The power structure in the traditional Romani people household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men, in general, have more authority than women.

Ancestors of modern-day Romani people were Hindu, but adopted Christianity or Islam depending on the regions through which they had migrated.

Distinctive sound of Romani people music has strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco in Spain.

Legislation decreed that all the Romani people living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves.

Some branches of the Romani people reached Western Europe in the 15th century, fleeing from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans as refugees.

In Western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against Romani people who constituted a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with attempts to commit ethnic cleansing until the modern era.

In times of social tension, the Romani people suffered as scapegoats; for instance, they were accused of bringing the plague during times of epidemics.

Later in the 19th century, Romani people immigration was forbidden on a racial basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world.

In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when the Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use of the Romani people language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children were sent to orphanages.

In Europe, Romani people are associated with poverty, blamed for high crime rates, and accused of behaving in ways that are considered antisocial or inappropriate by the rest of the European population.

Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani people has continued to be practiced to the present day, although efforts are being made to address them.

Romani people were a popular subject in Venetian painting from the time of Giorgione at the start of the 16th century; the inclusion of such a figure adds an exotic oriental flavour to scenes.

The Romani people were depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Othello and The Tempest, all by William Shakespeare.

Romani people were heavily romanticized in the Soviet Union, a classic example being the 1975 film Tabor ukhodit v Nebo.