Romani people in Romania
ethnic group
Romani people in Romania, locally and pejoratively referred to as the Țigani (IPA: [t͡siˈɡanʲ]), constitute the second largest ethnic minority in the country behind Hungarians. According to the 2021 census, their number was 569,477 people, constituting 3.4% of the total population.
The real size of the total population of Romani people in Romania is considered to be higher, with different estimates varying from 4.6 percent to over 10 percent of the population, as many Romani do not declare themselves as such. In 2007, the Council of Europe (CoE) estimated that approximately 1.85 million Roma lived in Romania, based on an average between the lowest estimate (1.2 to 2.2 million people) and the highest estimate (1.8 to 2.5 million people) with a maximum percentage of 12%, available at the time; the highest estimate, generated for the year 1991 and originating from a Securitate report, is considered unreliable, and Romanian post-communist censuses have consistently produced far lower figures. CoE's average estimate is equivalent to 8.32% of the population, a figure difficult to verify due to the mobility of Romani and the reluctance of some to disclose their ethnicity.
Origins
Romani people are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who traditionally lived a nomadic lifestyle. History, genetics and linguistics reveal that the ancestors of the Roma originated in South Asia, likely in the regions of present-day Punjab, Rajasthan and Sindh, which are part of contemporary Northwest India and Pakistan.
The history of their arrival in Romania, around 1370, is presented below.
The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that roots of Romani language lie in present-day India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a big part of the basic lexicon, for example, body parts or daily routines. More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Gujarati, Hindi and Punjabi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Romani people in Romania” 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.