Gadjo
non-Romani
In Romani culture, a gorja, gadjo (masculine), or gadji (feminine) is a person who has no Romanipen. This usually corresponds to not being an ethnic Romani, but it can also refer to an ethnic Romani who does not live within Romani society. The term is often used by Romanis to address or denote outsider neighbors living within or very near their community.
Etymology
The exact origin of the word gadjo is not known. One theory considers that it may come from the proto-Romani word for "peasant" and has the same root as the Romani word gav (village).
In other languages
Bulgarian
The word has been borrowed in Bulgarian as гадже (gadzhe), meaning boyfriend or girlfriend.
French
The word has been borrowed into French slang as gadjo (masculine) and gadji (feminine), meaning a boy or girl (or less frequently, a man or a woman) or boyfriend and girlfriend.
Portuguese
The European Portuguese words gajo (masculine) and gaja (feminine) originate in Romani/Caló and are used as everyday slang to refer to a man or a woman (usually referring to old teenagers or young adults), in a usage similar to "guy" and "gal" in English. The word gazim has been attested as a rare use in Brazilian Portuguese, with the meaning of a strange (i.e., foreign) woman, probably with roots in the Romani gadji.
Scots
The word is encountered as gadgie (or sometimes gadge) in Scots, formerly only used by the Roma/Traveller community, but since the 20th century, it has been in general use by the Scots-speaking population.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gadjo” is non-Romani. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gadjo and non-Romani, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1143834. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gadjo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.