Romani is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani communities. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani, Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak mixed languages based on the surrounding language with retained Romani-derived vocabulary – these are known by linguists as Para-Romani varieties, rather than dialects of the Romani language itself.
The Sinti are a subgroup of Romani people. They are found mostly in Germany, France and Italy and Central Europe, numbering some 200,000 people. They were traditionally itinerant, but today only a small percentage of Sinti remain unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities.
The Yenish are an itinerant group in Western Europe who live mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and parts of France, roughly centered on the Rhineland. A number of theories for the group's origins have been proposed, including that the Yenish descended from members of the marginalized and vagrant poor classes of society of the early modern period, before emerging as a distinct group by the early 19th century. Most of the Yenish became sedentary in the course of the mid-19th to 20th centuries.
Vlax Romani varieties are spoken mainly in Southeastern Europe by the Romani people. Vlax Romani can also be referred to as an independent language or as one dialect of the Romani language. Vlax Romani is the second most widely spoken dialect subgroup of the Romani language worldwide, after Balkan Romani.
The Romani language has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although the first example of written Romani dates from 1542, it is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by native Romani people arose.
Bohemian Romani or Bohemian Romany was a dialect of Romani formerly spoken by the Romani people of Bohemia, the western part of today's Czech Republic. It became extinct after World War II, due to the genocide of most of its speakers in extermination camps by Nazi Germany.
There are independent groups currently working toward standardizing the Romani language, including groups in Romania, Serbia, the United States and Sweden.
Domari is an endangered Indo-Aryan language, spoken by Dom people scattered across the Middle East and North Africa. The language is reported to be spoken as far north as Azerbaijan and as far south as central Sudan, in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon. Based on the systematicity of sound changes, it is known with a fair degree of certainty that the names Domari and Romani derive from the Indo-Aryan word ḍom. Although they are both Central Indo-Aryan languages, Domari and Romani do not derive from the same immediate ancestor. The Arabs referred to them as Nawar as they were a nomadic people that originally immigrated to the Middle East from the Indian subcontinent.
Burgenland Croatian is a regional variety of the Chakavian dialect of Croatian spoken in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Burgenland Croatian is recognized as a minority language in the Austrian state of Burgenland, where it is spoken by 19,412 people according to official reports (2001). Many of the Burgenland Croatian speakers in Austria also live in Vienna and Graz, due to the process of urbanization, which is mostly driven by the poor economic situation of large parts of Burgenland.
Balkan Roma, Balkaniko Romanes, or Balkan Gypsy is a specific non-Vlax dialect of the Romani language, spoken by groups within the Balkans, which include countries such as Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey etc. The Balkan Romani language is typically an oral language.
Sinte Romani is the variety of Romani spoken by the Sinti people in Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, some parts of Northern Italy and other adjacent regions. Sinte Romani is characterized by significant German influence and is not mutually intelligible with other forms of Romani. The language is written in the Latin script.
Northern Romani is a group of dialects of the Romani language spoken in various Northern European, northern Central European and northern Eastern European countries.
Bergitka Roma or Carpathian Roma are a Romani ethnic sub-group, living mostly in Poland in the Goral Lands. They were one of the first, if not the first, group of Roma to migrate to Poland, mostly from the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary, through the Carpathian Mountains, sometime during the 15th century. The name Bergitka is actually the term for the group used by other Roma groups, originating in German Berg, meaning "mountain". The members of the group refer to themselves simply as "Roma" or "amare Roma".
Goesharde Frisian is a collective term for three of the ten dialects of the North Frisian language. Goesharde Frisian is spoken in the historical Goesharde region north of Husum. The three distinct dialects are Northern, Central and Southern Goesharde Frisian. The latter became extinct with the death of the two last speakers in 1980 and 1981 in Hattstedt. Central Goesharde Frisian is therefore now the southernmost dialect of mainland North Frisian. Two local varieties of Northern Goesharde have been extensively catalogued, those spoken around the villages of Langenhorn and Ockholm.
Hungarian has ten dialects. These are fully mutually intelligible, and do not differ significantly from standard Hungarian except for the Csángó dialect. They are mostly distinguished by pronunciation; although there are differences in vocabulary, these are usually small and do not hinder intelligibility. Due to increased internal migration and urbanization during the 20th century, most of the characteristics of the different dialects can only be observed in smaller towns and villages, and even there mostly among the elderly; the population of the larger cities and especially the capital has been mixed for generations and the dialectal differences have been lost. A notable exception is the Western Transdanubian pronunciation, which is distinctly noticeable even in Szombathely, the largest city in the region.
Minority languages are spoken in a number of autochthonous settlements in Austria. These are:
Zipser German is a dialect of the German language which developed in the Upper Zips region of what is now northeastern Slovakia among people who settled there from present-day central Germany and the northern Lower Rhine river beginning in the 13th century.
Heinz Faßmann is an Austrian politician and professor of human geography and land-use planning at the University of Vienna. He served as the Minister of Education in the Second Kurz cabinet in the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the Schallenberg government of Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg. He previously served in the same capacity from December 2017 to June 2019: he was succeeded in the post by Martin Polaschek in December 2021. Faßmann is considered to be aligned with the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) but holds no formal party membership or affiliation.
Siglinde Bolbecher was an Austrian historian, exile researcher and poet.
Early Romani, sometimes referred to as Late Proto-Romani, is the latest common predecessor of all varieties of the Romani language. It was spoken before the Roma people dispersed throughout Europe. It is not directly attested, but rather reconstructed on the basis of shared features of existing Romani varieties. Early Romani is thought to have been spoken in the Byzantine Empire from the 9th to 10th and the 13th to 14th centuries.
