Domari language

Domari
Spoken in	Iran, Egypt, India, other
Region	Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, India
Native speakers	roughly 1.9 million, of which 1.3 million in Iran  (date missing)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Central zone Domari
Language codes
ISO 639-3	rmt

Domari is an Indo-Aryan language, spoken by the Dom people across the Middle East, mainly in Iran and Egypt, but significant numbers of speakers are also found in India where they are known as Domba.

Domari is also known as "Middle Eastern Romani", "Tsigene", "Luti", or "Mehtar". Dialects in include

• Nawari in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian Territories and Egypt.
• Kurbati (Ghorbati) in Syria and western Iran
• Helebi in Egypt and Libya
• Karachi (Garachi) in northern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus and southern Russia
• Marashi in Turkey
• Lyuli and Maznoug in Uzbekistan and Asian Russia
• Barake in Syria
• Churi-Wali in Afghanistan
• Domaki and Wogri-Boli in India

Some dialects may be highly divergent and not mutually intelligible.

Domari and Romani language

Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent, but more recent research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.^[1][2]

There are nevertheless remarkable similarities between the two beyond their shared Central zone Indic origin, indicating a period of shared history as itinerant populations in the Middle East. These include shared archaisms that have been lost in the Central Indo-Aryan languages over the millennium since Dom/Rom emigration, a series of innovations connecting them with the Northwestern zone group, indicating their route of migration out of India, and finally a number of radical syntactical changes due to superstrate influence of Middle Eastern languages, including Persian, Arabic and Byzantine Greek.

Language grouping

There is no standard written form of Domari. In the Arab world, it is occasionally written using the Arabic script and has many Arabic and Persian loanwords.[2]

The best known variety of Domari is Palestinian Domari, also known as "Syrian Gypsy", the dialect of the Dom community of Jerusalem , which had been described by R.A. S. Macalister as early as during the 1910s.

Further descriptive work was done by Yaron Matras (1996)[3]. Palestinian Domari is an endangered language, with less than 200 speakers, the majority of the 1,200 members of the Jerusalem Domari community being native speakers of Palestinian Arabic.

Numerals in the Romani, Lomavren and Domari languages, with Hindi forms for comparison.^[3]

	Hindi	Romani	Lomavren	Domari
1	ek	ekh, jekh	yak, yek	yika
2	do	duj	lui	dī
3	tīn	trin	tərin	tærən
4	cār	štar	išdör	štar
5	pāñc	pandž	pendž	pandž
6	che	šov	šeš	šaš
7	sāt	ifta	haft	xaut
8	āţh	oxto	hašt	xaišt
9	nau	inja	nu	na
10	das	deš	las	des
20	bīs	biš	vist	wīs
100	sau	šel	saj	saj

SIL Ethnologue breaks down the populations of speakers of the individual Domari dialect as follows:

• Iran: 1.34 million speakers (2000 WCD), including a number of widely divergent dialects (Kurbati and Luli in western Iran, Karachi in northern Iran, besides Qinati, Yürük, Koli, Maznoug and Nawar)
• Egypt: 0.23 million speakers (2004), Ghagar (Nawar) mainly in Dakahlia Governorate, northern Egypt, besides Helebi. The language is in the process of being marginalized by Egyptian Arabic
• India: 0.2 million speakers (2000 WCD), consisting of speakers of the Domba and Wogri-Boli dialects mostly in Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Orissa. In Bihar strongly assimilated to Bhojpuri
• Libya: 32,000 speakers (2000 WCD) of the Helebi dialect
• Turkey: 28,000 speakers (2000 WCD), mainly western Turkey, Karachi, Beludji and Marashi dialects. Note that Turkey also has significant Romani populations, and estimates regarding gypsies in Turkey often conflate the two groups (Gunnemark and Kenrick 1985).
• Iraq: 23,000 speakers (2000 WCD) known as Zott.
• Jordan: 5,000 speakers (2000 WCD), Nawar, Kurbat and Barake dialects.
• Lebanon: 7,500 speakers reported in 1932.
• Syria: 10,000 speakers reported in 1961, Nawari, Kurbat and Barake dialects
• Israel and Palestinian Territories: 2000 speakers reported by Matras (1997), in rapid decline. Mostly in Jerusalem, but also in Bir Zeit and Gaza. Vocabulary is strongly influenced by Arabic and by Iranian languages.
• Russia: Karachi dialect in the Caucasus, Luli and Maznoug dialects in Central Asia
• Uzbekistan: Luli and Maznoug dialects
• Sudan: Halabi and Ghajar clans

References

1. ^ What is Domari?, http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/files/21_domari.shtml, retrieved 2008-07-23 
2. ^ ON ROMANI ORIGINS AND IDENTITY, http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_b_history_origins&lang=en&articles=true, retrieved 2008-07-23 
3. ^ after Ian Hancock, On Romani Origins and Identity, RADOC (2007)[1]

Further reading

• Matras Y. (1999). "The state of present-day Domari in Jerusalem." Mediterranean Language Review 11, 1–58.
• Matras Y. (2002). Romani: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Windfuhr Gernot L. Gypsy ii. Gypsy Dialects in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition. 2002.
• Description of Domari from the Romani Project
• Learning Domari - from the Dom Research Centre
• More Information and Official Website of the Dom People