Speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as rromani ćhib "the Romani language" or romanes (adverb) "in a Rom way". This derives from the Romani word rom, meaning either "a member of the (Romani) group" or

In the 18th century, it was shown by comparative studies that Romani belongs to the Indo-European language family. In 1763 Vályi István, a Calvinist pastor from Satu Mare in Transylvania, was the first to notice the similarity between Romani and Indo-Aryan by

Today's dialects of Romani are differentiated by the vocabulary accumulated since their departure from Anatolia, as well as through divergent phonemic evolution and

The language is recognized as a minority language in many countries. At present the only places in the world where Romani is employed as an official language are the Republic of Kosovo (only regionally, not nationally) and the Šuto Orizari Municipality within the administrative

The first attestation of Romani is from 1542 AD in western Europe. The earlier history of the Romani language is completely undocumented, and is understood primarily through comparative linguistic evidence.
Linguistic evaluation

Romani is the only Indo-Aryan language spoken almost exclusively in Europe.
The most concentrated areas of Romani speakers are found in the Balkans and central Europe, particularly in Romania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Slovakia. Although there are no

Historically, Romani was an exclusively unwritten language; for example, Slovak Romani's orthography was codified only in 1971.