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Romani language standardization

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There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the Romani language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, the USA, Sweden, etc. A standardized form of Romani is used in Serbia, and in Serbia's autonomous province of Vojvodina Romani is one of the officially recognized languages of minorities having its own radio stations and news broadcasts. In Romania, the country with the largest identifiable Roma population, there is a unified teaching system of the Romani language for all dialects spoken in the country. This is primarily a result of the work of Gheorghe Sarău, who made Romani textbooks for teaching Roma children in the Romani language. He teaches a purified, mildly prescriptive language, choosing the original Indo-Aryan words and grammatical elements from various dialects. The pronunciation is mostly like that of the dialects from the first stratum. When there are more variants in the dialects, the variant that most closely resembles the oldest forms is chosen, like byav instead of abyav, abyau, akana instead of akanak, shunav instead of ashunav or ashunau, etc.

An effort is also made to derive new words from the vocabulary already in use, i.e., xuryavno (airplane), vortorin (slide rule), palpaledikhipnasko (retrospectively), pashnavni (adjective). There is an ever-changing set of borrowings from Romanian as well, including such terms as vremea (weather, time), primariya (town hall), frishka (cream), sfïnto (saint, holy). Neologisms taken from Hindi include bijli (bulb, electricity), misal (example), chitro (drawing, design), lekhipen (writing) and from English (printisarel, prezidento).

Language standardization is presently also being employed in the revival of the Romani language among various groups (in Spain, Great Britain and elsewhere), which have ceased to speak the language. In these cases, a specific dialect is not revived, but rather a standardized form derived from many dialects is learned.

See also