Travel talk

摘要

Every two weeks a language disappears. By 2100 nearly half of the 6,000 spoken today may be gone. Migration, either between countries or from the countryside to cities, is one reason: though new arrivals generally stick with their mother tongue, at least at home, their children rarely do. The dominance of English is another. But one tongue bucking the trend is Romani, spoken by 4m of the roughly 11m Roma (gypsy) people worldwide. Its health attests to the importance of language in shaping identity. Unlike most languages, Romani has no country to call home. Its roots lie in India, but since the 10th century its speakers have scattered and kept moving. One result is that they are everywhere a linguistic minority. Another is that 150 different dialects are in use. "Anglo-Romani", spoken in Britain, differs widely from dialects in France, Bulgaria and Latvia. One Roma man in New Zealand speaks a dialect previously only heard in Wales.