Romani alphabets

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,^[1] 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.).

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".^[1] 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^[2] and the Polish publication Informaciaqo lil,^[3] 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.^[4]

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.^[1]

Descriptive linguistics has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription.^[1] Despite small differences between individual linguists in the representation of certain phonemes, most adhere to a system which Hancock terms Pan-Vlax.^[3]

Systems currently in use

The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography.^[1] There are three main systems which are likely to be encountered: the Pan-Vlax system, the International Standard and various Anglicised systems.^[3]

Pan-Vlax

In most recent descriptive literature, a variety of the orthography which Ian Hancock terms Pan-Vlax will likely be used.^[3] 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 diacritics 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):

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.^[3] 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᾿.^[1] Finally, the representation of the phoneme /ɻ/ (the reflex of the Sanskrit retroflex series^{[citation needed]}), 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.^[3]

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 carons with acute accents, 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 ^[5] in different phonological environments.^[6]

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.^[3]

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.^[3] 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.^[1] In addition, it is this orthography which is recommended for use by Romani scholar and activist Ronald Lee.^[4]

Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet of Kalderash dialect^[7]

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^[8]

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 Greece, 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".^[9] 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".^[10]

See also

• Writing system
• Romani language

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Matras, Yaron (2002). Romani: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-512-02330-0.
2. ^ Sarău, Gheorghe (1994) Limba Romani: Manual pentru Clasele de Invățători Romi ale Școlilor Normale Bucharest: Editura Didactică și Pedagogică
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} Hancock, Ian (1995). A Handbook of Vlax Romani, Columbus: Slavica Publishers. ISBN 0-89357-258-6.
4. ^ ^{a b} Lee, Ronald (2005). Learn Romani: Das-dúma Rromanes, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. ISBN 1-902806-44-1.
5. ^ Whether these endings are to be analysed as postpositions or case endings is still a matter of debate in Romani linguistics. See, for example, Hancock (1995) and Matras (2002) for varying approaches.
6. ^ Matras, Yaron (1999). Writing Romani: The pragmatics of codification in a stateless language. Applied Linguistics, vol. 20, pp 481-502.
7. ^ http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/romani.pdf
8. ^ M. Serghievsky, A. Barannikov. Romani-Russian dictionary. Moscow, 1938
9. ^ P. Bakker, K. Kyuchukov, What is the Romani language ?, p. 90, Centre de Recherches Tsiganes, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000. ISBN 1902806069
10. ^ http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_c_language_standardization&lang=en&articles=true

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)