Standardisacia e Romane Chibaki: Gàdjengo Maripen pre Mari Kultura! / Language Standardisation: a Gàdjo Attack on Our Culture!

(April 2017)

As those of you who regularly follow my posts will know, I am implacably opposed to the attempts to impose a so-called “standardised” dialect of Romani upon us. This article explains in detail my objections and sets them against the pro-standardisation arguments.

The pro-standardisationists argue that we “need” a standard dialect because of the difficulties that can arise in mutual understanding between speakers of different dialects: Romani is, without a doubt, by far the most dialectally-variant language in the world, with several thousand different dialects, falling into thirty or more broad dialect groups. Within each group, mutual intelligibility is easy and practically 100%, and the groups themselves cluster into “supergroups” within which there is fairly easy intelligibility for an experienced and fluent speaker – but between disparate “supergroups” there may be difficulty, as there may be when unfamiliar foreign loanwords are encountered. 

 

For example, my own dialect is part of the north-western “supergroup”, and since I'm a native speaker, I don't have much trouble understanding any of the other north-western dialects, aside from unfamiliar loanwords. My dialect is also rather closely related to the Carpathian dialects (it's an ancestral relationship – my dialect is extremely archaic), giving me another group of dialects that I can readily understand. But some of the more “distant” dialect groups are more difficult: I can understand Kalderash because I've had practice – I have Kalderash-speaking friends – but I've noticed that Kalderash speakers who haven't seen my dialect before can have a really hard time with it. And I find the Arli/Erli group difficult – although I've got the hang of many of its grammatical oddities now, it has a huge amount of vocabulary that has been influenced by non-Romani languages, sending me scrabbling for a dictionary. 

 

So the argument of the standardisationists is that if we all abandon our own dialects and adopt a standardised dialect, these difficulties (which are by no means insurmountable – it didn't take me long to get the hang of understanding Kalderash, for all that it's very different to my own dialect) will go away. 

 

But there's a problem right there, right away: I'm in my fifties and have spoken Romani all my life. Do they seriously expect me to un-learn my native language, and learn an entirely different, artificial version of it, now? I suspect that that would be impossible, even for me – and I'm highly intelligent, educated, and a researcher of linguistics who speaks Goddess-knows-how-many languages... what chance would a minimally-educated, illiterate Rom or Romni of my age-group (or older) have? 

 

And this brings in also my second point, which is that our thousands of dialects are gems of historical and ethnographical information about our forebears, as you will see if you have read my articles about comparative dialectology and the mistakes that the gàdjo tsiganologists have made about our history, particularly in regard to my own dialect. And replacing our wonderful and beautiful variety of dialects with a grey, amorphous and soul-less construct would be an unforgivable act of cultural vandalism. 

 

At this point, the standardisationists invariably say, “Mà dar adolester, rànie, you don't need to forget your own dialect, just speak our invented dialect in parallel!”. But this is hoxapen, because trying to speak two parallel dialects of the same language (one highly artificial) is likely to cause a lot of confusion and lead to gradual erosion of the genuine dialects – most especially when the next generation learns Romani. I would predict that if this is brought in, within 50 years at most our real dialects will be destroyed by contagion from the constructed dialect, and with them will be lost all of their as-yet-untapped ethnographical and historical data. That would be a tragedy. We would be throwing away a thousand years of history on the whim of egotistical gàdje who want to replace our authentic language that came with us from India, with some nonsense concocted by those same gàdje in a university office. 

 

There are also political/organisational problems with the standardisation efforts. Principally, that there are simply too many different ones! The best-known of them is the dialect created by Marcel Courthiade and enthusiastically promoted by Georghe Sarău (along with its impossible alphabet, using characters such as θ, ç and ʒ – no doubt thrown in by the inventors to show what oh-so-clever linguists they are, but try explaining them to a barely-literate Rom/ni!), but there are several other proposed “standards” too. Which rather defeats the point of “standardisation” in my view! 

 

(Hey, here's an idea – why don't we all write in Devanagari instead, it makes a great alphabet for Romani? मार्सेल् कूर्तियद्, चिव् अकलेस् प्रे तिरि बुल्! Haha! Your move, Mr. Gàdjo Linguist!) 

 

Anyway, one of the arguments advanced against the “single standard dialect” of Courthiade and Sarău is that, given the variety of dialects across the Romani diaspora, that dialect will inevitably be radically different from, and nowhere near mutually-intelligible with, many of our own dialects. Therefore another group has proposed creating four “standard” dialects on a supergroup basis: for instance, the north-western group will have its own “standard” dialect, and the Vlax group a different one. But that gives us the worst of both worlds: all the drawbacks of standardisation for no benefits, because within each supergroup, the dialects are quite readily mutually intelligible in any case – and it does absolutely nothing to address the real issue of how people who speak radically different dialects should communicate, since the four “standards” would not be mutually intelligible! Therefore, my considered judgement on that effort is mile bershenge koshava les te bichenavela ko Naraka! [I curse it to be sent to Naraka for 1000 years!]. 

 

Another “standardisation” attempt that I believe is misguided, even though undoubtedly well-intentioned, is Romano-Kàlo. This is being promoted especially in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, to enable the Calé Roma to regain their language – the Caló dialect was largely lost due to persecution (as were many other dialects of Romani, sadly). However, Romano-Kàlo is not at all authentic for Romani as it was spoken in the Iberian peninsula, much of it is “borrowed” from Kalderash, resulting in a bizarre mish-mash of dialects. And since Caló (at least, in its later, strongly Spanish-influenced form, spoken in the early 19th century) is thoroughly recorded, it is entirely unnecessary to make an artificial dialect; and even if there are elements missing, it would have been far more appropriate to borrow from a closely-related dialect, such as one of the Kàle. 

 

And there are yet other “standardisation” attempts, including one based in Serbia, which seems to be associated with the highly-questionable so-called “World Roma Organisation”, which actually has no existence at all outside Serbia (well, except for the equally-dubious Ian Hancock, who is involved in the whole sordid business, and who regrettably does exist), and all of its web tentacles vanished overnight when people started investigating its hoxapen – and yet it has managed to enact some very dubious dealings with the Indian government, purporting to speak for all Roma. Quite a neat trick for a gàdjo hoxano and a non-existent organisation... 

 

We now come on to the linguistic argument, and since the Courthiade/Sarău dialect appears to be the only one that has any real traction towards being imposed as a standard (well, outside of Serbia and Ian Hancock's mind, at any rate), that is the one that I will discuss. 

 

Courthiade and Sarău are both gàdje; naturally, neither is a native Romani speaker. I put it to you, is it sensible for non-native speakers to design a “standardised” dialect of a language, especially one with as much complexity and subtlety as Romani has? Of course not! 

 

Their dialect is deeply flawed, and in fact proves very difficult to understand for native Romani speakers of any dialect group with the possible exception of Arli (I speak from experience, the “standard” dialect is horrible!). The grammar is corrupt, for example there is a lack of proper distinction made in the inflected cases between masculine and feminine nouns, which can lead to enormous confusion, and there are many other features in the designed grammar that are totally unnatural for native Romani speakers. 

 

Perhaps the best way I can illustrate it for those readers who don't speak Romani is this: imagine, if you will, that it is ordained that from now on you must forget the regular English (be it British, American or whatever) that you know, and speak a rigid, prescribed dialect made from a particular form of street argot, with its mangled grammar and pronunciation enshrined as “the right and only way”. Ridiculous? You bet! But this is what happens when gàdje are allowed to set themselves up as “experts” in our language and arbiters of what is “right and proper”. 

 

Tala, so te kerasa? [Well then, what do we do?]...

 

In truth, I don't believe the problem is as bad as it's made out to be. As I've mentioned before, it's generally not that difficult for a fluent, native speaker to get the hang of even a quite different dialect, given a short “acclimatisation time”, particularly if each speaker makes allowances for the other and tries to avoid using unusual loanwords or known oddities and archaisms of their dialect. I'm very aware of this myself: the dialect that I speak is extremely archaic and has some definite oddities because of that, such as its very unusual non-compound future tense, and some very rare words. But if I'm talking with someone who isn't familiar with my dialect, I deliberately avoid using the troublesome future tense (you can use ka plus present, although strictly speaking that's really the present/future conditional, not the future indicative, in my dialect – but it's very widely understood) and substitute better-known words for the odd ones – for example, the correct word for 'law' in my dialect is liri, but I'll often write liri [kriso], giving a much commoner synonym from other dialects in brackets. With a little bit of understanding like that, inter-dialectal communication isn't that big a problem; and if you're talking face-to-face, then of course you can ask for clarification – “so se 'hochewichi'? Phenela pes 'niglo' – tikno shtor-pirengro koneske bute, bute kàre tha pishoma se?” [what's hochewichi? Does it mean niglo – a little animal with lots and lots of prickles and fleas?] (hochewichi is the very unusual word for 'hedgehog' in my dialect; niglo is a commoner word at least in dialects that have had contact with German – and in fact some of the other north-western tribes use e hochewichia as a not-entirely-complimentary nickname for the Romanichal, since the word survived into Angloromani). 

 

And the most important thing is to preserve and to teach our many, many beautiful dialects so that they remain viable and correctly spoken, and so that the next generation remain fluent speakers who can manage to cope with the inter-dialectal differences. And we must also take back control and ownership, not just of our language, but also of our culture and our history, from the stupid and/or corrupt gàdje or kashtale academics who have done us such disservice for so many years. Since we Roma have for so long been systematically excluded from the gàdjikano academic world, unless we buy into their lies and corruption and promote their twisted view of ourselves, we must create and promote our own, alternative, institutions – created by Roma, for Roma. It is for precisely this reason that I am one of the joint founders of the Indo-Romani Vidyalaya, which was set up precisely as a Roma-only organisation; Vidyalaya (Sanskrit, विद्यालय) means “seat of learning”.