Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Romani society and culture
Summary
The Romani people are a distinct ethnic and cultural group of peoples living all across the globe, who share a family of languages and sometimes a traditional nomadic mode of life. Though their exact origins are unclear, central India is a notable point of origin. Their language shares a common origin with, and is similar to, modern-day Gujarati and Rajasthani, borrowing loan words from other languages as they migrated from India. In Europe, even though their culture has been victimized by other cultures, they have still found a way to maintain their heritage and society. Indian elements in Romani culture are almost non-existent, with the exception of their language. Romani culture focuses heavily on family. The Roma traditionally live according to relatively strict moral codes.
Linguistic and phonological research has traced the Roma people's origin to places in the Indian subcontinent. Many report in extracts from popular literature that Romani emerged from the North-west regions of India, rather than from Central India. Features of phonological developments which emerged during the early transition stage from Old to Middle Indic prove that the history of Romani began in Central India. The Romani language shares many features with the Central Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Rajasthani; it also shares connections with Northern Indo-Aryan languages like Kashmiri, and the language itself contains a cluster of Persian and Arabic words. Linguists use these phonological similarities as well as features of phonological developments which emerged during the early transition stage from Old Sanskrit to Middle Indic Prakrit to conclude that the history of Romani began in Central India.
Another legend described the Persian king Bahram V, who took musicians from India to Iran at A.D. 420–438, then wandered over the Silk Road to Europe. Some believe the Roma are their descendants.
The Romani people are today found across the world. Typically, Roma adopt given names that are common in the country of their residence.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.