ANGLO-ROMANI
Danny Noonan, Rita Marable
& Zac Fulton (see handout “Fulton.pdf”)
Account of Settler Groups
  Romani is an Indic language associated with a group of
traveling people who left Northern India sometime
between the 6th-11th century and spread to many parts
of the world.
  They arrived in Europe around the 16th century
  When the travelers arrived in Europe they referred to
themselves as Rom, Romany or Romani
  Thinking they were from Egypt, Europeans called them
Gypsy
Current Number of Speakers
  190,000-250,000 speakers worldwide
  About 90,000 speakers are in England, Scotland, Wales
and South Africa
  About 5,000 speakers are in Australia,
  Another 100,000 speakers in United States.
  Angloromani is the in-group language of a marginalized
minority.
  Used as a secret code when speakers do not want to be
understood by outsiders, to identify each other in
public, or at Romani gatherings to show and strengthen
community unity
  Not used in the home, or with children until
adolescence
  Acquired by adolescents after English competence
already developed
When Did it Start?
  Dating the language is difficult since the Romanichals
were not interested in writing their language down.
  Many of their speakers have a very protective attitude
about revealing details of their speech to outsiders or
about admitting that such dialects even exist
  If the dialects became too well known, their function
would be lost
We Do Know
  Gypsies have been in Britain since 1505
  The first written reference to Anglo-Romani was in 1547
  A recently discovered manuscript from 1616 shows a
word list and the replacement of the original Romani
grammatical system with English
Origins of Anglo-Romani
  A conscious creation by English speaking vagrants and
Romani-speaking Romanichals?
  A gradual disappearance of the original Indic inflection
with replacement of English system?
  A result of young people no longer having access to full
system of the language and inserting words from older
generations of their family?
Sociolinguistic Variation
  In Britain it is called posh'n'posh (literally 'half and half')
or pogadi jib 'broken language‘
  In the US speakers commonly call it Romnis.
  There are about two to three thousand documented
Anglo-Romani words, but the average middle aged
Romanichal has a vocabulary of about 300 - 800
  People in the community who have larger vocabularies
are admired
  Speakers who are regarded by others as more
competent or fluent will tend to downplay it because of
other individuals who are even better speakers
  Full language competence is generally something that is
attributable to others
  Speakers have a permanent self-image of only having a
semi competence of the language
  Community members see the language as an
incomplete, remote, almost lost language that they
have only partial access to
  Linguistic competence is associated with past
generations without reference to a specific point in
time.
  Speakers of Angloromani are aware of the use of distinct
special vocabularies by other "Traveling" groups, notably
Irish and Scottish Travelers
  This has lead to a generic use of the term Romani to
indicate the in-group speech any Traveling populations
A Joke
  Two Romanichals were adrift in mid-ocean on a raft,
after their ship went down. The first lifted his arms to
the heavens and cried "Oh Lord, if you get me out of
this, I'll give you both my trailers, two piles of copper
pipe and a whole set of Crown Derby." The second,
hearing this, then raised his own arms and said "Lord, if
you save me, I'll give you six trailers, ten piles of scrap,
and seven sets of Crown Derby!" The first looked at him
and said "Hang on, you haven't got six trai- ", but the
second cut in quickly and hissed "Kecker! Mandy's jeein'
the gaira!"
  Only the punch line is in Anglo-Romani and means 'Shut
up! I'm kidding him along!‘
  The Romanichal think that even God doesn’t understand
the language.
Classification of the Contact Language
  Anglo-Romani is an intertwined or mixed language
created from English and Romani
  Peter Bakker describes it as a language that “roughly
combines a colloquial English structure with a Romani
lexicon” (Bakker 2000)
  Most of the Romani words used in Anglo-Romani are of
Indian origin. Others are from Greek, Persian, and
Armenian. In addition to that there are a few words
from other European languages and other Traveler
languages.
Phonology
  The same as British English
  The voiceless uvular fricative /x/ still exists in some
dialects but often becomes the voiceless velar stop /k/
or the voiceless glottal fricative /h/.
  No distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated
stops
Morphology
  Use of English inflectional morphology
  Loss of gender and case distinctions in pronouns
  English comparative and superlative forms
Sample Texts
Listening Sample
  Or if I was in a place with me dad years ago, and he’d
say to me/ before we went in this place he’d say to me:
må rokker, let mandi rokker, til ya chib.
And I could never say nothing until I went outside.
Let mandi rokker.
And he used to say: mo/ muk’ us jå, you know.
Angloromani
må
rokker
mandi
til chib
Romani
ma
(v) rakermande
thil-/ther
čhib
muk
jå
mukhdža-
Translation
‘do not’
‘to speak’
‘me’
‘to hold’
‘language/
tongue’
‘to let’
‘to go’
References

Bakker, P. 2000. The genesis of Angloromani. In: Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle. Commitment in
Romani Studies, edited by Acton, T. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. 14-31. Retrieved
January 25, 2010, from http://www. books.google.com

Görlach, M. 1997. Varieties of English world-wide: where we stand. In: Links & Letters. 13-36. Retrieved
January 27, 2010, from http://www.books.google.com

Hancock, I. F. 1984. Romani and Angloromani. In: Languages in the British Isles, edited by Trudgill, P.
Cambridge: Cambridge University press. 367-383. Retrieved January 25, 2010, from
http://www.books.google.com

Hancock, Ian. "The Cryptolectal Speech of the American Roads: Traveler Cant and American Angloromani."
American Speech. 61. 3 (1986): 206-220.

Matras, Yaron. (n.d.) Manchester Romani Project. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from
http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/Research/Projects/romani/files/21_angloromanisample.shtml

Matras, Y., H. Gardner, C. Jones, and V. Schulman. "Angloromani: A Different Kind of Language? "
ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS. 49. 2 (2007): 142-184.