Ian Hancock

His mother, Kitty, is Romanichal; his father, Reginald (Redžo), was part Romungro, the descendant of a Hungarian speaker of North Central Romani named Imre Benczi.

He acquired the surname Hancock by Imre's daughter, Maria, who married a member of an English West Country showman family of that name.

In the late 1960s, he became a Romani rights activist after reading reports about anti-Romani discrimination in Britain.

As evidence, he points to the presence of Indic words specifically of military origin and to a Banjara oral legend telling of Rajputs who left India through the Himalayas during the Ghaznavid invasions and never returned.

As for Romani history, he points out a "Pariah syndrome" throughout time and space, culminating in the attempted genocide at the hands of Nazi authorities that was simultaneous to that of the Jews and part of the same "Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Problem" project.

He later identified another variety of that language spoken among Black Seminole descendants in the village of El Nacimiento [es] in the Mexican state of Coahuila, where their ancestors had settled in 1850.

He says that Guinea Coast Creole English was spoken in coastal slave trading bases such as James Island, Bunce Island, and Elmina Castle, where the offspring of British slave traders and their African wives used it as their native language.

He also maintains that some of the Africans taken as slaves to the New World already spoke Guinea Coast Creole English in Africa.