Romani alphabets

Printed anthologies of Romani folktales and poems began in the 20th century in Eastern Europe, using the respective national scripts (Latin or Cyrillic).

[2] Written Romani in the 20th century used the writing systems of their respective host societies, mostly Latin alphabets (Romanian, Italian, French, etc.).

Efforts of language planners have been hampered by the significant dialectal divisions in Romani: the absence of standard phonology, in turn, makes the selection of a single written form problematic.

In an effort to overcome this, during the 1980s and 1990s Marcel Courthiade proposed a model for orthographic unification based on the adoption of a meta-phonological orthography, which "would allow dialectal variation to be accommodated at the phonological and morpho-phonological level".

One reason for the reluctance to adopt this standard, according to Canadian Rom Ronald Lee, is that the proposed orthography contains a number of specialised characters not regularly found on European keyboards, such as θ and ʒ.

[5] Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary and so on.

A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.

[4] This orthography is not a single standardised form, but rather a set of orthographical practices which exhibit a basic "core" of shared graphemes and a small amount of divergence in several areas.

[4] This particular orthography seems to have arisen spontaneously as Romani speakers have communicated using email, a medium in which graphemes outside the Latin-1 charset have until recently been difficult to type.