by Anne Penny

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 12, 2009

They used to come by the village in central England where we lived. My mother would say, "The gypsies are here again!" We knew that meant they would come to the door to fill water containers, sell their wooden pegs and their crochet-work and mend the zinc buckets. They camped nearby with their beautifully decorated, horse-drawn caravans and we children used to go and shamelessly stare at them as they bathed their babies in the open air. We used to fantasize about going with them, always travelling around ... never going to school.

Only when I was older did I wonder about their origins, their different looks and language. They have no written history, so where they came from was shrouded in mystery for centuries and ideas proliferated as to whence they came into Europe. It was obvious when they arrived there, sometime before the 15th century, that they were not European in appearance and spoke a strange, unfamiliar language.

It is now generally accepted that the Roma people originated in north-western India over 1000 years ago. It is not known why they left there, but there were a number of migrations resulting in their spreading, eventually, all over the world. It is estimated that there are over 12 million Roma [some estimates suggest 20 million] spread over many countries. Exact figures are hard to ascertain as they are generally excluded from official census exercises.

It is possible that the Roma first left northern India in response to a threat of being overrun by Islam, in the 11th century. They crossed over the Himalayas, followed the Silk Road and eventually reached the Byzantine Empire. The migrations took place over some hundreds of years, traceable largely through language: Romani shows language influences such as Armenian and Greek, among others, indicating the route taken.

The dark-skinned, black haired Roma people spread further west in the 13th and 14th centuries, appearing in northern Europe in the early 1500's. Their language went unrecognized until the late 1700's when scholars acknowledged that Romani was an Indian language in origin with similarities to Sanskrit and Hindi. It had been changed and modified by the languages of countries they passed through as they migrated, but basic Romani words are those of an Indian language.

Persecution has dogged the Roma people for centuries: their different looks and language, their nomadic lifestyle singled them out and they were often cruelly treated. As early as 1510 the French expelled them

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