Domari is an endangered Indo-Aryan language, spoken by Dom people scattered across the Middle East and North Africa.

[1] Based on the systematicity of sound changes, it is known with a fair degree of certainty that the names Domari and Romani derive from the Indo-Aryan word ḍom.

[5] The Arabs referred to them as Nawar as they were a nomadic people that originally immigrated to the Middle East from the Indian subcontinent.

[7] Descriptive work was done by Yaron Matras,[8] who published a comprehensive grammar of the language along with a historical and dialectological evaluation of secondary sources.

[9] In certain areas such as Jerusalem, only about 20% of the Dom people speak the Domari language in everyday interactions.

The modern-day community of Doms in Jerusalem was established by the nomadic people deciding to settle inside the Old City from 1940 until it came under Israeli administration in 1967 (Matras 1999).

Published sources often lump together dialects of Domari and the various unrelated in-group vocabularies of diverse peripatetic populations in the Middle East.

These include: shared archaisms, which have been lost in the Central Indo-Aryan languages over the millennia since Dom/Rom emigration, a series of innovations connecting them with the Northwestern zone group, indicating their route of migration out of India, and a number of radical syntactical changes, due to superstrate influence of Middle Eastern languages, including Persian, Arabic and Byzantine Greek.

The Domari language emphasizes stress on the final syllable, as well as grammatical markers for gender and number.