The Institute for Bible Translation has published a series of books in four dialects of the Romani language. The new editions contain translations of selected books from the Old and New Testament: Genesis, Ruth, Jonah and the Gospel of John.
The Romani language belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of Indo-European languages, i.e., it is related to the languages of India and Pakistan. Four dialects of Romani that are widespread in Russia were chosen for the translation of the Holy Scriptures: Vlax, Lovari, Crimean and Servi. The translation was carried out by Pioneer Bible Translators (PBT) with the help of experts and speakers of these dialects. Each of the dialects has its own unique history, testifying to the ways in which the Roma (also known as Gypsies) have migrated over the centuries. There are approximately 205,000 Roma living in Russia, of whom about 80% speak Romani.
Romani is classified as a macrolanguage, consisting of several smaller languages. Servi, Vlax and Lovari belong to the large group of Vlax dialects. It includes the dialects formed in the territory where Romanian is spoken.
It is likely that the ancestors of the Servi Roma began migrating from Romanian-speaking countries to the territory of present-day Ukraine in the 17th century at the earliest. This is evidenced by the large number of Romanian loanwords. The Servs settled mainly from the area of Slobozhanshchina to the middle reaches of the Volga.
The Vlaxs are close to the area where the Servs live. In in the Stavropol region of Russia they form the majority of the Roma population. In terms of phonetics and morphology, the dialect has more in common with the northern branch than with Servi. The lexicon contains even more borrowings from the Romanian language.
The Lovars represent the northern branch of the Vlaxs. Historically, they lived in a Hungarian-speaking area for a relatively long time. This is reflected in their vocabulary in the form of a significant number of Hungarian loanwords.
Of the four dialects, the Crimean dialect is the most prominent. It belongs to the Balkan group. Before the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, two groups of Roma lived in Crimea: one Tatar-speaking and the other Roma-speaking. The latter group is thought to have emerged after the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812 and the transfer of Bessarabia and Budjak to Russia, from where they moved to Crimea. This historical reconstuction is supported by the similarity of the Crimean dialect with the Bessarabian dialects. The dialect is characterised by the presence of a large number of Crimean Tatar loanwords. During the famine of 1921, many Crimean Roma moved to Krasnodar Krai, where they form the majority of the Roma population.
The translations of Genesis, Ruth, Jonah and John in these dialects are available in electronic format on IBT’s website.