Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language

Romani is one of Britain's oldest and most established minority languages. Brought to the country by Romani immigrants from continental Europe in the sixteenth century or even earlier, it was spoken in its old, inflected form as a family and community language until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it yielded to English. But even after its decline as the everyday language of English and Welsh Gypsies, Romani continues to survive in the form of a vocabulary that is used to exp...