This prompted the philosopher Christian Jakob Kraus to collect linguistic evidence by systematically interviewing the Roma in Königsberg prison.

Kraus's findings were never published, but they may have influenced or laid the groundwork for later linguists, especially August Pott and his pioneering Darstellung der Zigeuner in Europa und Asien (1844–45).

By the mid-nineteenth century the linguist and author George Borrow was able to state categorically his findings that it was a language with its origins in India, and he later published a glossary, Romano Lavo-lil.

[30] In particular, the grammaticalization of enclitic pronouns as person markers on verbs (kerdo 'done' + me 'me' → kerdjom 'I did') is also found in languages such as Kashmiri and Shina.

[30] This includes inflectional affixes for nouns, and verbs that are still productive with borrowed vocabulary, the shift to VO word order, and the adoption of a preposed definite article.

[34][35] The following table presents the numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with the corresponding terms in Sanskrit, Hindi, Odia, and Sinhala to demonstrate the similarities.

[30] The earlier history of the Romani language is completely undocumented, and is understood primarily through comparative linguistic evidence.

The latest territory where Romani is thought to have been spoken as a mostly unitary linguistic variety is the Byzantine Empire, between the 10th and the 13th centuries.

The language of this period, which can be reconstructed on the basis of modern-day dialects, is referred to as Early Romani or Late Proto-Romani.

[39] Today's dialects of Romani are differentiated by the vocabulary accumulated since their departure from Anatolia, as well as through divergent phonemic evolution and grammatical features.

[40] Matras (2002, 2005) has argued for a theory of geographical classification of Romani dialects, which is based on the diffusion in space of innovations.

According to this theory, Early Romani (as spoken in the Byzantine Empire) was brought to western and other parts of Europe through population migrations of Rom in the 14th–15th centuries.

He also names as "pogadialects" (after the Pogadi dialect of Great Britain) those with only a Romani vocabulary grafted into a non-Romani language (normally referred to as Para-Romani).

In the second there are Ćergari (of Podgorica), Gurbeti, Jambashi, Fichiri, Filipiʒi (of Agia Varvara) The third comprises the rest of the Romani dialects, including Kalderash, Lovari, Machvano.

[44] The most concentrated areas of Romani speakers are found in the Balkans and central Europe, particularly in Romania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Slovakia.

At present the only places in the world where Romani is employed as an official language are the Republic of Kosovo (only regionally, not nationally)[46] and the Šuto Orizari Municipality within the administrative borders of Skopje, North Macedonia's capital.

The first efforts to publish in Romani were undertaken in the interwar Soviet Union (using the Cyrillic script) and in socialist Yugoslavia.

[44] Different variants of the language are now in the process of being codified in those countries with high Romani populations (for example, Slovakia).

[50] He teaches a purified, mildly prescriptive language, choosing the original Indo-Aryan words and grammatical elements from various dialects.

An effort is also made to derive new words from the vocabulary already in use, i.e., xuryavno (airplane), vortorin (slide rule), palpaledikhipnasko (retrospectively), pashnavni (adjective).

There is an ever-changing set of borrowings from Romanian as well, including such terms as vremea (weather, time), primariya (town hall), frishka (cream), sfïnto (saint, holy).

[53] Among native speakers, the most common pattern 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- and Czech-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.

Its most marked features are a three-way contrast between unvoiced, voiced, and aspirated stops, and the presence in some dialects of a second rhotic ⟨ř⟩.

[57] General Romani is an unusual language, in having two classes of nominals, based on the historic origin of the word, that have a completely different morphology.

[60] Nouns are marked for any of eight cases; nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative, and instrumental.

[62][63] The oblique cases disregard gender or type: -te / -de (locative), -ke / -ge (dative), -tar/-dar (ablative), -sa(r) (instrumental and comitative), and -ker- / -ger- (genitive).

So-called athematic adjectives had the nominative forms -o in the masculine and the feminine and -a in the plural; the oblique has the same endings as the previous group, but the preceding stem changes by adding the element -on-.

However, they are also sensitive to recent development - for example, in general, Romani in Slavic countries show an adoption of productive aktionsart morphology.

[57] The non-perfective personal suffixes, continued from Middle Indo-Aryan, are as follows:[57] These are slightly different for consonant- and vowel-final roots (e.g. xa-s 'you eat', kam-es 'you want').