User:Dewrad/Romani writing systems

The Romani language has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although our first example of written Romani dates from 1542. It is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by native Roma begins to be found. Currently, Romani is written using Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic and Devanagari scripts, with the Latin script predominating in scholastic works.

Standardisation
Currently there is no one single standard orthography used by both scholars and native speakers. Efforts of language planners have been hampered by the not inconsiderable dialectal divisions in Romani: the absence of a normative standard phonology in turn renders the selection of a single written form problematic.

In an effort to overcome this, during the 1980s and 1990s Marcel Courthiade proposed a model for orthographic unification based on the adoption of a meta-phonological orthography, which "would allow dialectal variation to be accommodated at the phonological and morpho-phonological level". This system was presented to the International Romani Union in 1990, who adopted it as the organisation's "official alphabet". This recognition by the International Romani Union allowed Courthiade's system to qualify for funding from the European Commission.

Despite being used in several publications, such as the grammar of Romani compiled by Gheorghe Sarău and the Polish publication Informaciaqo lil, the IRU standard has yet to find a broad base of support from Romani writers. One reason for the reluctance to adopt this standard, according to Canadian Rom Ronald Lee, is that the proposed orthography contains a number of specialised characters not regularly found on European keyboards, such as θ and ʒ.

Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary and so on. A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.

Descriptive linguistics has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription.

Latin
The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography. There are three main systems which are likely to be encountered: the Pan-Vlax system, the International Standard and various Anglicised systems.

Pan-Vlax
In most recent descriptive literature, one will encounter a variety of the orthography which Hancock terms Pan-Vlax. This orthography is not a single standardised form, rather a set of orthographical practices which exhibit a basic "core" of shared graphemes and a small amount of divergence in several areas. The Pan-Vlax script is based on the Latin alphabet, augmented by the addition of several diacritics common to the languages of eastern Europe, such as the hacek.

In the following table, the most common variants of the graphemes are shown. The phonemes used in the table are somewhat arbitrary and are not specifically based on any one current dialect (for example, the phoneme denoted in the table can be realised as,  or , depending on dialect):

The use of the above graphemes is relatively stable and universal, taking into account dialectal mergers and so on. However, in certain areas there is somewhat more variation. A typically diverse area is in the representation of consonants not present in most varieties of Romani. For example, the centralised vowel phonemes of several varieties of Vlax and Xaladitka, when they are indicated separately from the non-centralised vowels, can be represented using ə, ъ or ă. Another particularly variant area is the representation of palatalised consonant, which are absent from a number of dialects. Some variant graphemes for include tj, ty, ć, čj and t᾿. Finally, the representation of the phoneme (the reflex of the Sanskrit retroflex series), which in several dialects has been merged with, tends to vary between rr, ř and rh, and sometimes even gh, with the first two being the most frequently found variants.

International Standard
The International Standard orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade and adopted by the International Romani Union, uses similar conventions to the Pan-Vlax system outlined above. Several of the differences are simply graphical, such as replacing carons with acute accents, transforming č š ž into ć ś ź. However, its most distinctive feature is the use of "meta-notations", which are intended to cover cross-dialectal phonological variation, particularly in degrees of palatalisation; and "morpho-graphs", which are used to represent the morphophonological alternation of case suffixes in different phonological environments.

Devanagari
The sources of modern use of Devanagari are not documented, but claimed to be appeared when Roma individuals began to study the Romani language and culture in the Indo-Aryan context, either as self-educated persons or in the higher education available in Romani (mostly in central and southeastern Europe), with a contemporary utilization far less than of the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet. Devanagari has a certain appeal since its graphemes are suited for the Indo-Aryan sound system (the aspirated phonemes, for example, have distinct letters or the presence of the sound noted by व्, something between v and u in the Latin alphabet). It also possesses a simple and organized structure based on phonology. The evolution of the language from Sanskrit to modern Indo-Aryan languages brought into use few new phonemes as the script evolved from Brahmi to Devanagari. Then, in the last centuries, since Devanagari gained a stable form, there has been only one diacritic for new sounds, nukta, applied to a letter marking a close sound.

Devanagari is, likewise, the vehicle of a cultural area similar to that of the Romani people, giving important tools for creativity. It does not yet have a tradition of use.

Below is the table of correspondences between Devanāgarī and Latin writing systems (there might be also other Latin variants in use):