Although Romani—the language of the Roma or Gypsies—is a macro-language with divergences as pronounced as those of the Slavic languages, it is a language without a territory, perpetually outside any kind of enclosure. Indeed, many Roma communities speak languages that are a hybrid between the surrounding language and Romani, a circumstance that has given rise to the emergence of varieties of para-romaní that must be distinguished from the concept of dialect. Some of these mixtures bear no structural traits of Romani and only retain words from the lexicon of a specific dialect.
This ease for linguistic hybridization is inseparable from the marginality of the gypsy communities and the locus where it takes place, the encampment. Romani is not the language of a “people” and as such has not been regulated grammatically by a state, it is a language as itinerant as the “band” that produces it. A nomadic language in its lexical and syntactic flexibility. It is a “living” or “wild” language that, having developed on the margins of sedentary societies, has not been codified and frozen by identitary institutions specially charged with its care. In view of the above, we can propose that a flexible and moving language is proper to the encampment, just as a static and grammatically adequate language is proper to the state.
The problem with unregulated languages such as Romani is that as they mix with the surrounding languages they lose the ability to document their own identity, which explains why it was through genetics and not linguistics that the mystery of the origin of the Gypsies, who come from northern India and not from Egypt as was traditionally believed, could be unraveled. In the words of Agamben: “the ethnographic investigation, in this case, becomes impossible because the informers are systematically lying.”1 This leads us to affirm that unregulated languages are not a reliable instrument for recording the history of a people and forming an historical consciousness.
In fact, Hanna Arendt identifies historical consciousness as one of the factors that, after the emancipation of nations from dynastic rule, gave rise to the formation of national identities through their vernacular languages, a matter we referred to in the previous item as the relation between language and people. Thus, “it seemed that peoples whose language was fit for literature had reached national maturity per definitionem.” 2 Seen in this light, an itinerant people like the Roma has never had the slightest chance to establish itself as a nation or attain any sort of enduring legal status from any legally constituted people. As a people (band), the Roma are legally invisible.
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