Domari language

Domari
Native to	India, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Sudan, and perhaps neighboring countries
Region	Middle East and North Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, India
Ethnicity	Dom
Native speakers	moribund? (2012)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Hindi? Romani–Domari? Domari
Language codes
ISO 639-3	rmt
Glottolog	doma1258

Domari is an Indo-Aryan language, spoken by older 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, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon. Based on the systematicity of sound changes, we know with a fair degree of certainty that the names Domari and Romani derive from the Indian word ḍom.

Domari is also known as "Middle Eastern Romani", "Tsigene", "Luti", or "Mehtar". There is no standard written form. In the Arab world, it is occasionally written using the Arabic script and has many Arabic and Persian loanwords. Descriptive work was done by Yaron Matras (1996) who published a comprehensive grammar of the language along with an historical and dialectological evaluation of secondary sources (Matras 2012).

Dialects

The best-known variety of Domari is Palestinian Domari, also known as "Syrian Gypsy", the dialect of the Dom community of Jerusalem, which was described by R.A. S. Macalister in the 1910s. Palestinian Domari is an endangered language, with fewer than 200 speakers, the majority of the 1,200 members of the Jerusalem Domari community being native speakers of Palestinian Arabic.

Other dialects include:

• Nawari in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Egypt.
• Kurbati (Ghorbati) in Syria and western Iran
• Helebi in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco
• Halab/Ghajar in Sudan.
• Karachi (Garachi) in northern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus and southern Russia
• Marashi in Turkey
• Lyuli and Maznoug in Uzbekistan and Asian Russia
• Barake in Syria
• Churi-Wali in Afghanistan
• Domaki and Wogri-Boli in India

Some dialects may be highly divergent and not mutually intelligible. Published sources often lump together dialects of Domari and the various unrelated in-group vocabularies of diverse peripatetic populations in the Middle East. Thus there is no evidence at all that the Lyuli, for example, speak a dialect of Domari, not is there any obvious connection between Domari and the vocabulary used by the Helebi of Egypt (see discussion in Matras 2012, chapter 1).

The small Seb Seliyer language of Iran is distinctive in its core vocabulary.

Comparison with Romani

Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent, but more recent research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.

There are nevertheless remarkable similarities between the two beyond their shared Central zone Indic origin, indicating a period of shared history as itinerant populations in the Middle East. These include shared archaisms that have been lost in the Central Indo-Aryan languages over the millennium since Dom/Rom emigration, a series of innovations connecting them with the Northwestern zone group, indicating their route of migration out of India, and finally a number of radical syntactical changes due to superstrate influence of Middle Eastern languages, including Persian, Arabic and Byzantine Greek.

Orthography

Since Domari is a minority Middle-Eastern language for a specific community of speakers, it did not have a standard orthography for many years; therefore——many writers have used differing spelling systems (similarly to what happened with Ladino). Most Middle-Easterners used the Arabic script, while scholars made duty with a modified Pan-Vlakh Latin-based alphabet.

Yaron Matras used such a system in his recent publications on this subject——where the Pan-Vlakh orthography served as a basis, with several modifications:

• Romani j changed to y
• Romani c use limited to the accented form č for /tʃ/; the /dʒ/ counterpart being denoted by dž
• Doubled vowel letters for long vowels (aa ee ii oo uu)
• Diphthongs denoted with vowel pairs (ai au ei eu oi and so on...)
• Additional letters in use for Semitic-derived words and names (ḍ ḥ ṣ ṭ ẓ ġ q ‘ ’ and so on...)

A new Semitic-flavored Latin-based pan-alphabet has recently been introduced by some scholars for the purpose of codifying written Domari.

Numerals

Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Hindi and Persian forms for comparison. Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.

	Hindi	Romani	Domari	Lomavren	Persian
1	ek	ekh, jekh	yika	yak, yek	yak, yek
2	do	duj	dī	lui	du, do
3	tīn	trin	tærən	tərin	se
4	cār	štar	štar	išdör	čahār
5	pāñc	pandž	pandž	pendž	pandž
6	che	šov	šaš	šeš	šaš, šeš
7	sāt	ifta	xaut	haft	haft
8	āţh	oxto	xaišt	hašt	hašt
9	nau	inja	na	nu	nuh, noh
10	das	deš	des	las	dah
20	bīs	biš	wīs	vist	bist
100	sau	šel	saj	saj	sad

Further reading

• Herin, B. (2012). "The Domari language of Aleppo (Syria)" Linguistic Discovery 10 (2), 1-52.
• Herin, B. (2014). "The Northern Dialects of Domari," Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 164 (2): 407-450.
• Matras, Y. (1999). "The state of present-day Domari in Jerusalem." Mediterranean Language Review 11, 1–58.
• Matras, Y. (2002). Romani: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Matras, Y. (2012). A grammar of Domari. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton (Mouton Grammar Library).

External links

• Windfuhr Gernot L. Gypsy ii. Gypsy Dialects in Encyclopædia Iranica, Online Edition. 2002.
• Description of Domari from the Romani Project
• Learning Domari - from the Dom Research Centre
• More Information and Official Website of the Dom People