The Romani language (or, according to some, languages) is spoken by upwards of twelve million people worldwide. Traditionally an oral language, Romani has only been written down since the early nineteenth century, and the orthographies in use are often coloured by the native or other languages of the creators. For example, the orthography of the International Romani Union was created by Marcel Courthiade of the Manouche, and so has many similarities with the alphabet of Standard French. Furthermore, some orthographies are based on the Roman alphabet while others are based on Cyrillic.
My solution is to dispense with Latin, Cyrillic and other existing alphabets altogether and create a distinctive Romani alphabet, capable of writing most, if not all, Romani dialects without the need for diacritics:
This alphabet- Romanes-lekhipen (lit. “Romani writing”) or the alafbei (from the first two letters alaf and bei) takes influence from the orthographies of medieval South Asia, as well as those of various contact languages, including Pahlavi (Middle Persian script), Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and Latin. I must, however, stress that this script is not intended to replace any of the other systems, but to give the Romani their own easy-to-use script. Initially, this started out as a hobby, thinking to how a Romani script might have developed if they were an oral society, but it evolved into something bigger since I started working on it at the end of 2019.
Initially, it was an abugida like the systems used for most of the Indo-Aryan languages, but I found this unwieldy to work with and changed it to an alphabet in the spring of 2021. The reason it is an alphabet is my belief that an alphabetic system would be more familiar to the vast majority of Romani- those who are literate (as illiteracy is still high, especially in Eastern Europe[1]) write in either the Latin or Cyrillic script depending on local preference.
Romanes-lekhipen is highly phonemic in the name of enabling easy literacy. This is in contrast to languages such as English where a grapheme may have many different pronunciations depending on context. It is extremely well-documented that ESOL learners can have difficulty with spelling as a result, and if as many Roma are as illiterate or underliterate as the ECRRS suggests, it would be far easier for them to pick up a “one letter, one sound” alphabet. Each character has its own distinctive form, yet characters representing sound variants have some similarity to the “core” character:
Note also that some characters are reserved solely for writing “para-Romani” dialects, which are so mixed with surrounding languages as to be unintelligible to a speaker of Romani proper. These include “modern” Angloromani, which in the last century has levelled to the point that it is considered a dialect of English, albeit with a few distinctive Romani words.
A short sample text, the first sentence of the UDHR in Kalderash (from here):
Sa e manušikane strukture bijandžona tromane thaj jekhutne ko digniteti thaj capipa.
All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
What do you think? Feedback very much welcomed!
EDIT 31/1/24: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Romani had over twelve million speakers worldwide. This is incorrect, and the article has been updated with the true number.
[1] While few statistics on literacy levels are available, the EC Regional Roma Survey of 2011 suggests that fewer than a quarter of Roma in Eastern Europe complete secondary education. It can therefore be concluded that literacy amongst this segment of the population is far lower than among non-Roma.