Finnish Romani

Romani belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the Indic languages spoken outside India by itinerant groups that originally migrated from the Indian subcontinent. Romani is believed to have emerged from ‘Proto-Romani’, which is presumed to have originated in Central India. Later contacts with Byzantine Greek have had a far-reaching impact on the Romani language.

Linguists commonly divide the Romany dialects of Europe into four main groups: Northern, Balkan, Vlax and Central. Finnish Romani belongs to the North-Western sub-group of the Northern dialects, which trace back to Europe’s German-speaking regions. Romani has been spoken in Finland for about 450 years. The first mention of the Roma people arriving in Finland is in the official records of Kastelholm Castle in the Åland Islands dating from 1559.

Finnish Romani has changed greatly during the 450 years it has been spoken in Finland. Its pronunciation and syntax have been influenced by Finnish, it employs numerous loan words, and its morphology, too, has undergone changes. Swedish has had a marked lexical influence on Finnish Romani, whereas Finnish loan words have had a lesser impact on its vocabulary.

Concern over the declining use of Romani in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted active efforts to preserve the language and standardise its written form. A committee appointed by the Ministry of Education was assigned the task of compiling an easy-to-read Romani orthography and normative lexicon (1971). Education has played a key role in efforts to revitalise the language. Romani has been taught in comprehensive schools since the early 1980s on an extracurricular basis. Romani language and culture have been taught more widely since their addition to the elective curriculum in 1989.

Romani owes its survival to its oral tradition as a clan language and secret language used by Roma people to communicate amongst themselves. In recent decades it has been adopted in public institutions such as schools, the church, public administration and the media. Nevertheless, Finnish Romani has, at best, only a brief and limited written tradition, the majority of existing texts having been published either for educational or religious purposes.