Anglo-Romani
'Anglo-Romani' is a term used to describe usage of words of Romani origin within English conversation. Romani was spoken in England until the late 19th century; perhaps a generation longer in Wales. It was replaced by English as the everyday and family language of British Romanies but this does not mean the language disappeared entirely. Words of Romani origin were still used as part of a family-language. Words which are occasionally inserted into English conversation are referred to in linguistic literature on Romani as 'Para-Romani': the selective retention of some Romani-derived vocabulary following the disappearance of Romani as an everyday language of conversation.
Anglo-Romani is thus more a vocabulary, than a 'language' in the strict sense. It is used within the framework of English conversation, English sentences, and English grammar and pronunciation, thus: The mush was jalling down the drom with his gry. means 'The man was walking down the road with his horse.
There is a good linguistic analysis by Ian Hancock at
Anglo-Romani is peculiar in that it shares some traits with Romani, but not enough to be a separate language, hence its often characterised as a "creolized language". In fact, some native users call it "Rumnis" or "Broken Romani"; Hancock thinks the correct term is probably that of an "ethnolect of the community". He notes its linguistic history:
"In summary, there are sufficient references from the 16th and early 17th centuries to a contact language used between Romanies and non-Romanies for it to be possible that Angloromani became distinct from Romani during that period. That there are no texts from that time is not remarkable in view of the secret nature of the language; in fact only one verified text in inflected Romani itself is known to us from that date. It is clear that English—and hence Angloromani—had already become the dominant language of much of the Romani population in Britain at this early date, since the phonological changes accompanying the shift from Early Modern to Late Modern English) also affected the Romani words it contained."
"Angloromani cannot be regarded as a pidginized language in the light of e.g. Taylor's 15 criteria (1971:295); it retains a fair degree of productive morphology, albeit deriving almost entirely from English, and it lacks many of the linguistic features generally associated with pidgins. It did, however, originate from a contact situation, and does conform to Hymes' requirements, quoted above. And in particular, it exhibits very extensive internally generated innovative lexicon, perhaps far more extensive than that found in actual pidgins and creoles; and to a lesser degree, morphological devices originating in the source language (Romani) have been readapted, and continue to be productive in ways not paralleled in either English or Romani. "
Some of the ways in which it has lost or "broken" apart from Romani in favour of English forms are as follows:
- All distinctions of gender and case have been lost in Angloromani
- Inflected Romani has both prepositions and postpositions. The former e.g, əprey "up", təley "down", pâwdəl "across", &c.), have been retained in Angloromani, while the latter have been replaced by English prepositions, with the possible exception of -sa "with", which may, according to Smart & Crofton (1875:133) and Borrow (1874:58) function prenominally.
- As well as losing postpositions, Angloromani has also lost the reflexive possessive third person singular and plural pronouns which in inflected British (i.e. Welsh) Romani are pesk- "his/her own' and peŋ- "their own", as opposed to lesk- "his", lak- "her", leŋ- "their".Romani verbs belong to four classes, and are inflected for person, tense and number. In Angloromani the morphology is English, the native stem often corresponding to the third person singular present indicative in the inflected language. There is historically no infinitive in Romani, but in the Central and Northern dialects the third person singular has come to assume this function, cf. Czech Romani kamav te džal "I want to go", kamav jov te džal "I want him to go."
Welsh Romani
Welsh Romani is a variety of the Romani language which was spoken fluently in Wales until at least the 1950s. It was spoken by the Kale group of the Roma people who arrived in Britain during the 15th century. The first record of Gypsies in Wales comes from the 16th century.
The majority of the vocabulary is of Indo-Aryan origin but there are a number of loanwords from Welsh such as melanō ("yellow", from melyn), grīga ("heather", from grug) and kraŋka ("crab", from cranc). There are also English loanwords such as vlija ("village"), spīdra ("spider") and bråmla ("bramble").
The book in the Jersey library is the major study of it: John Sampson (1926) The dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, being the older form of British Romani preserved in the speech of the clan of Abram Wood, Oxford University Press, London
Wesh Romani retained all the features of Romani as a language in its own right that are lacking in Anglo-Romani. Unfortunately there are no longer any speakers of this language still alive:
"Nowadays no English Romany that I know of can still speak or even understand the old Romany language that I described earlier in the book. The last three Welsh Romanies to speak the language perfectly without mixing any English or Welsh into it were Manfri, Howell and Jim Wood of Bala, Merioneth. They are all dead now. There are still a number of quite good Welsh Romany speakers around even today, but they all mix a certain amount of English and Welsh into their Romany, and their grammar is not as pure any more as that of the three people I have mentioned. To get an idea of what Romany was like at the time when it was still a language in its own right in this country, one has to study John Sampson's book, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales; and to get an idea of the right intonation of the language on can listen to a recording of a Welsh Romany conversation between Manfri and Howell Wood at Bala - recorded by Peter Kennedy, and available for students at the Sound Library, Cecil Sharp House, Regent's Park Road, London NW1. "
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