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T. Acton & M. Dalphinis (eds.)
Language, Blacks and Gypsies
London: Whiting & Birch (2000). Pp. 9-23

Standardisation and Ethnic Defence in Emergent Non-Literate Societies: The Gypsy and Caribbean Cases

Ian Hancock

(Essay written in 1979)

With non-literate communities so widespread throughout the world, why select Gypsy and Caribbean societies in particular - and why treat them together? There are a number of reasons, historical as well as social. In Britain, where both Gypsies and Caribbean people have settled as non-white immigrants, though separated by some four hundred years, both have come to constitute ‘problems’ for the host community. I use the term loosely; we may certainly constitute problems for those looking for something to worry about; the sociological literature is full of articles dealing with West Indians and Gypsies in terms of being ‘problems’. What is less often considered is the other side of the coin: the many problems that the so-called host community presents in turn for Romanies and West Indians.

We know from experience that in the past, few outsiders have involved themselves with Gypsies or Caribbeans without having some underlying personal motive, whether it has been from a desire to ‘improve’ our lot for us, or to gather material for a dissertation or a book or, in some cases, to collect information clandestinely to be used by the authorities. Sometimes it has been used to fulfill some romantic fantasies; literature and the media do little to dispel the stereotypes which attract such people.

Gypsies and West Indians are immigrants not only in Britain, but also everywhere else except for India and Africa, our ancestral homelands (although it is misleading to think that Gypsy origins are firmly in India, or that all Gypsies today can trace their biological descent to that area, despite its emotional significance for supporters of the nationalist movement; similarly, while pan-Africanism has had widespread support throughout the Caribbean, not all West Indians are of African descent by any means; sometimes we find ourselves buying into the stereotypes others have about us, and believing in them as well). Of course, the notion of ’immigrant’ is itself a relative one. The British Celts were not particularly pleased at the large-scale influx of Anglo-Saxons into this country sixteen hundred years ago, although the descendants of those Germanic invaders hardly see themselves as immigrants today - indeed, there are Celtic nationals in Britain who would maintain that it is their own people who are made to feel like the interlopers; they were after all referred to as the foreigners (wealh) by their Germanic invaders. We are clearly dealing here with an issue of power.

Romanies and West Indians have both been enslaved, and it is because of slavery that huge diasporas of our people have taken place. Emancipation for both came about at more or less the same time, during the middle of the past century. For Gypsies, slavery lasted for five centuries or more, and when anti-slavery movements were becoming vocal in Europe, Gypsy slaves were frequently compared with their African counterparts in the Americas. In 1837, Mihail Kogalniceanu wrote that:

The Europeans are organising philanthropic societies for the abolition of slaver)’ in America, yet in the bosom of their own continent of Europe there are 400,000 Gypsies who are slaves, and 200,000 more equally victim to barbarousness (1837, p.iv).

Twenty years later in 1857, the historian Vaillant said that those who:

... shed tears of compassion for the Negroes of Africa, of whom the American republic makes its slaves, should give a kind thought to ...the Gypsies of India, of whom the European monarchies make their ‘Negroes’ (1857. p.7).

The Gypsy population in Britain was not subjected to the same kind of slavery as that which existed in south-eastern Europe, but it was nevertheless still harshly treated. At one time, it was a hanging offence merely to be born a Gypsy in England; that policy even exceeded the aims of plain genocide, since it applied in addition to individuals who were not Gypsies, but who were guilty of socialising with them. Simson (1865) and Kinney (1973) have both written about how Gypsies could be made ‘slaves for life’ in 16th and 17th century Britain and, as in other western European nations, England and Scotland saw one solution to their ‘Gypsy problem’ in the American colonies. From 1664 onwards, unspecified numbers of Gypsies from those countries were being shipped off to work in the Caribbean and North American plantations. We read in Moreton’s account of Jamaica, published in 1793, of Gypsies as young as eleven years old being used for sexual purposes not only by the European overseers, but by the Africans there as well. France, Portugal and Spain were also transporting Gypsies overseas (Hancock 1986a).

Out of these transplanted societies have arisen new cultures, with their roots to some extent intact from the lands of their forefathers, but with branches and leaves which have flourished under different skies. Afro-Caribbean societies have retained much that is obviously African; likewise, Gypsy societies everywhere maintain elements of culture, and especially language, which are traceable to India. Caribbeans of Chinese, East Indian, Irish and other ancestry have had more success in retaining their original character, but in coming into contact with other peoples, under less than ideal circumstances, even these cultures have been modified, and are being modified still.

Over the past century, some scholars have been fascinated by this phenomenon, and have made extensive studies of language and culture in contact. In the West Indies we talk about creolisation, and while the same label has been applied to the Gypsy situation, maybe with some justification, there are significant linguistic differences. For one thing, Gypsies arrived here speaking one language common to the group, Romani, and the intermixing with the local population and with the English language was more or less voluntary, or at least seen as expedient in terms of survival. In some isolated parts of Britain, there are still people who are able to speak the original Romani language, while for everyone else, a new, restructured speech has replaced it. In the West Indies, on the other hand, Africans arrived speaking hundreds of different languages, and were made to integrate with each other rather than with members of the host society. In fact in time, they became themselves the majority society, though until recent times not, politically the dominant one. Again a restructured speech came to replace the earlier languages, and while linguistic particulars may differ, the social consequences in each situation have much in common.

This fact has not escaped some scholars: since John Atkins’ observation that the language of the ‘Creoles’ he visited in Jamaica in 1722 was “a kind of Gypsy gibberish that runs smoothest in swearing’, a number of creolists have written more or less extensively on Romani as well, among them Emilio Teza, Adolfo Coelho, Hugo Schuchardt, Charles Godfrey Leiand, Peter Bakker, Norbert Boretsky, James Creswell Clough, William Washabaugh, and Dell Hymes. One of the first creolists, Lafcadio Herne, who wrote on Louisiana Creole French, himself came from Gypsy stock.

Another early connection between Romanies and the emerging Creole societies in the Americas is found in John Stedman’s 1790 Narrative. Stedman himself was intrigued by Gypsies and asked to be buried next to Bampfylde Moore Carew, his ‘kindred spirit’, and in his discussion of Sranan, the Creole language of Surinam, he compares some of its vocabulary to Romani (Stedman 1988, p.516). ‘Gypsy’ languages in the Caribbean have most recently been discussed by Aceto (1997).

Both West Indians and British Gypsies use as their ethnic speech kinds of language which have grown out of contact situations. Both have also arisen from a social mould in which these types of speech have been seen as inferior and inadequate by the respective power structures. This is not uncommon when decisions and pronouncements are made by representatives of those structures; unless they come from members of the communities who themselves aspire to the values of the superordinate society, attitudes such as these are not shared by the speakers of these languages themselves. Unfortunately, the effects of cultural colonisation have been far reaching, and such individuals are rare. There is still a majority of West Indian citizens who will tell you with confidence that their native language, whether it be Guyanese Creolese or Jamaican Patois or Belizean Creole, is broken English, and quite unsuitable for anything other than jokes or Nancy stories. Some people, who, without hesitation, will address an Englishman in that Englishman’s native language, would become quite angry should that Englishman attempt to address him in theirs.

In dealing with the status and potential of such languages, we must keep the approaches to these aspects quite distinct; what we may know as linguists to be true, does not always translate in terms of speaker attitude. While language planners can debate over orthography and choice of lexicon, the people in the street may remain unswervingly convinced that their language stigmatizes them, and as a result give little or no support to efforts to effect its standardisation. But this is a complex issue, and one squarely based in the individual’s social and educational background. In the Caribbean, for example, the working-class masses are often functionally monolingual in Creole and, depending upon the particular country we are talking about, may seldom be in a situation in which the coexistent metropolitan language (usually the language of colonialism) matters much. But middle-class members of the same societies can be very language conscious, and as the teachers and decision-makers in those societies, their attitudes are understandably far-reaching. For those people who, in the current jargon are typed as “upwardly socially mobile’, Creole speech may be too blatant a link with the working-class roots they may have sprung from. In the United States, where Black English issues have much in common with those in the West Indies, the most vigorous opposition to the use of Black English in the schools as a medium of instruction comes not from the white community, but from middle-class black parents, who argue that Black English cannot express everything that International English can, that it is somehow a lazy and ungrammatical deviation from it, and that efforts to use it as a medium of instruction in the schools are just another white plot to keep Black Americans out of the mainstream by denying them access to the language of the power structure. Nor is such reasoning unknown in the Caribbean - especially the kind which stresses the inadequacy of Creole, or which attempts to make a case for its being a reminder of colonialism. Neither of these is valid as I will demonstrate, although there are more persuasive arguments which might be made, of course, for example that the development of local Creoles at the expense of English might fragment the Caribbean nations instead of bringing them close together, or that enormous sums of money would have to be spent to produce educational material in each of the local vernaculars.

Deriving Creole languages from the slave trade and colonialism is one of the false notions about Black history which outsiders have foisted upon the colonised. Stokely Carmichael said that those who are in a position to define others are their masters, and this must be extended to those who define other people’s histories too. The slave trade was responsible only for carrying Creole - and I am restricting this discussion only to those Creoles sharing an English-derived lexical base - across the Atlantic, not for creating it. More recent research by creolists and historians, some of them Caribbeans like Walter Rodney, has shown quite clearly that Creole came into existence in a situation of domestic equality before the English became involved in the trans-Atlantic trade. In fact, the English who settled and married into the coastal African societies in the early 1600s and whose children were the first Creoles, were allowed to do so under sufferance from the local African authorities at that time. It was when the English stopped buying slaves from the Dutch in the Caribbean and began importing their own that this social situation became drastically altered; but by this time, at least two generations of Afro-Europeans - Creoles - had grown up, and their societies become established. It was with these people, and especially with the grumettoes or African porters who worked for them, and not the Europeans that Africans were kept while awaiting shipment. It was from these people that they learnt more or less of the Guinea Coast Creole and brought it with them to the western hemisphere to become one of the inputs into, or components of, the emerging Caribbean linguistic situation (Hancock 1986b, 1987). It cannot, therefore, be argued that Creole is the result of slavery; its widespread use and subsequent establishment in the West Indies was a matter of expediency, just as some African languages also became lingua francas in the same area for a time, even among people who had no historical claim to them, for example Yoruba in Brazil, Efik in Cuba, Congo in Guyana, Mandinka in Grenada or Ashanti in Jamaica.

I have dwelt upon this historical aspect because knowledge of our true history is a central factor in shaping our revised attitudes towards the languages we speak. We must write our own histories, and not accept unquestioningly the details or our past presented to us in books written by outsiders, whose priorities have almost always been different from our own. As Public Broadcast Service media critic Hodding Carter said in response to a question asking why so little news from Africa was covered in the United States:

Africa is not viewed as important. It’s not the heritage of most of the people watching. It becomes important only when our government says it’s of immediate national importance, which usually means an East-West power struggle (Townley 1984, p.4).

Two years later, a similar article in the same magazine reiterated the point: “Clearly, Africa is not a top priority of television news” (Kalter 1986, p.10). We are minority populations with little representation or influence in the power structure and, by extension the media; our problems, however real to us, seldom touch the day-to-day existence of the mainstream. We only become important, and receive attention, when the government says we are important, which usually means when we are causing that mainstream some kind of discomfort. Otherwise, our function appears to be only to provide a measure by which the majority can recognise the boundaries of its own culture, as Sibley (1981) argues. This requires that minorities, including Gypsies and West Indians, be defined by that culture in a manageable way, and part of that involves minimising the legitimacy of our languages and our histories:

The mental age of an average adult Gypsy is thought to be about that of a child of ten. Gypsies have never accomplished anything of great significance in writing, painting, musical composition, science or social organisation. Quarrelsome, quick to anger or laughter, they are unthinkingly but not deliberately cruel. Loving bright colours, they are ostentatious and boastful, but lack bravery ... their tribal customs sometimes have the force of law ... they betray little shame, curiosity, surprise or grief and show no solidarity (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1956).

The Negro could not be expected to participate in the conquest of the United States. His language consisted mostly, at the time of the Revolutionary War, of grunts, a sign language, and a few words. The jargon of the jungle was in his tongue and the Congo flowed deep in his brain. He was being taught and was learning words sufficient in his new language to make known his wants (Brady 1955, p. 12).

Once, however, it has been convincingly demonstrated that all natural languages are the result of human interaction and predictable linguistic development, and that none is in any way inadequate within the culture for which it serves as a vehicle, the first step towards linguistic self-determination will have been taken.

During the Middle Ages, the vernacular of the masses in England was of course English, but the languages of education, politics and the law were Latin and French. English was the target of the same negative attitudes that Creole is often subjected to today; native speakers themselves internalised these attitudes, so that even as late as the middle of the Renaissance, Arthur Golding could refer to English as a ‘rude’ language, “voyd of ornate termes’; William Barkar spoke of English as ‘our grosse tongue, a rude and barren tongue, when it is compared with so flourishinge and plentifull a tongue [as Latin]’. Roger Ascham called it ‘so meanly ... that no man can do worse’, while William Adlington thought it was ‘barbarous and simply framed’ (Williams 1975, pp.87-98). In reaction to these feelings, writers of the time ‘gilded’ their language with excessive numbers of Latinisms, in an attempt to give it some imagined dignity. It has been estimated that over a quarter of the entire Latin lexicon turned up in the English writing of this period. This is reminiscent to some extent of the highly embellished oratorical register of West Indian English which has been studied by Abrahams and others. While most of this Latin element has not survived, a source-count taken from a modem English dictionary indicates that only 28 per cent of the total lexicon is traceable to the original Anglo-Saxon - a far smaller percentage of items from the core of direct retention, incidentally, than is found in the anglophone Creoles, so-called ‘mixed’ languages.

While time has lent respectability to English, two factors in particular have had even greater significance: firstly, writings in the native tongue by people such as Gower, or Lydgate, or Chaucer, who were able to demonstrate chat the vernacular could be used creatively and expressively, and secondly, the spread of English as the vehicle of a powerful colonial, that is political, force.

It must not be imagined that knowledge of the legitimacy of language history will provide all the answers. Pragmatically we have to accept that linguistic attitudes are a reflection of social ones, and whether it can be shown to the entire academic world that Creoles are models of optimum human grammatical structure, and of immense significance to linguist and geneticist alike, or that Romani is a conservative descendant of noble Sanskrit with conjugations and declensions rivalling those of Latin and Greek, their speakers remain niggers and gyppoes in the eyes of the larger society. As long as we continue to allow ourselves to be defined and evaluated from outside, and as long as we continue to aspire to external norms, the situation is not going to change. I am not proposing separatism here; the world has become far too small for that. Rather, I am proposing that our attitudes towards ourselves be more independent of externally-applied values.

It is sad to me that there are so many parents who have made up their minds not to pass the ethnic language on to their children. I have attended several conferences in the West Indies where there have been individuals who have sat patiently in the back listening to the linguists expounding upon creolisation, only to jump up, finally, in angry desperation to say how wrong it is to waste money and energy even to consider such issues, when the same effort could be put into teaching ‘good’ English more successfully in the schools- I know Gypsy families in the United States in which Romani has been withheld from the children intentionally, with the aim of making them more ‘modern’.

Along with these attitudes about language, whether in the Caribbean or the Gypsy situations, there automatically go attitudes about the ancestral cultures and values too; for many West Indians, anything too blatantly ‘African’ carries with it negative connotation. The very names brought from Africa - Quashiba, Quaco, Congo, Cuffie - have become negative in their present-day applications. Yet there is a paradox here, because Creole culture is felt to be the real one; the Afro-Seminole Creoles in Texas for example, find amusement in their own behaviour. They will go to the doctor like anyone else, and even openly ridicule their own folk medicine. But just to be sure, they say, they’ll pay a quiet visit to the local Seminole herbalist as well. In the same way, Creole-speaking Louisianans say Angley sey pu monti, Gombo sey pu paley veritey-la - ‘English is for telling lies, Creole is for telling the truth’. For such groups, language and culture identify them to themselves and to the outside.

Creole societies have a double attitude to the world at large. Outwardly, they belittle the native culture and esteem that of the European, while inwardly they believe the reverse. Similarly, Gypsies maintain that one should be a Gypsy among Gypsies, but act like a gaujo (a non-Gypsy) when in that company. The Welsh have a saying, cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon - ‘a nation without a language is a nation without a heart’ - a sentiment echoed by the Surinamese Creole writer J. Koenders, who said wan pipel di no abi wan tongo, noiti kan de san difiti na neng fu wan pipel - ‘A people without a language can never be called a people’. One Romani maxim maintains that amari chib si amari zor - ‘Our language is our strength’. Language and ethnic identity are very clearly bound together for oppressed peoples.

We cannot stop being what we are merely by ceasing to speak our language; speaking English doesn’t turn us into Englishmen. By the same token, we cannot fully participate as members of our particular group if we cannot speak the language of that group. Londoners of, say, Jamaican descent who cannot speak Jamaican know how out of place they can feel in a Jamaican-speaking environment. Among Romanies, fluency in the language is such a powerful ethnic factor that those who are unable to speak Romani are excluded from all kinds of social functions. Renowned Romani author, the late Matéo Maximoff, went so far as to say “whoever no longer speaks Romani is no longer a Romani” (1994).  Such people find themselves in a quandary, since they cannot automatically fit smoothly into any alternate society even if they wanted to - especially if their ethnic or racial differences are readily visible, or if the alternate society is an especially conservative one. Even fully assimilated individuals, for example a sixth-generation American of Chinese descent with no first-hand knowledge of Chinese language or culture, and whose principal diet is coke and hamburgers, will be put into a category on the sole basis of his physical appearance and the stereotypes held about that category, and then be expected to behave accordingly. For others, however, their natural behavioural characteristics may not be easily adjusted; as the Creole proverb says,_yu kyan aid fi-yu grandi ina di kobod, bot yu kyaan mek im na kaaf (you can hide your grandmother in the cupboard, but you can’t stop her from coughing).

I’m not discussing here those individuals who have made the transition, voluntarily or because of family circumstances, and who are comfortable in their acquired identity. There is nothing at all wrong with this. What I’m concerned with instead are the issues surrounding the use of the vernacular language, rather than the imposed, or non-ethnic, language. At the present time, considerable interest exists in creating standardised, written varieties both of various Creole languages and of Romani. In some places, this has been successful; Sranan, Papiamentu and Tok Pisin support growing literatures, for example, but in each case there are clear factors which have made this possible. For the anglophone Caribbean and for Romani, the situation is less straight-forward. I will deal with each situation separately.

THE ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN

Throughout the Caribbean there are spoken a great many dialects of what I have called Western Atlantic Anglophone Creole. The whole Atlantic area may tentatively be divided into three: the Eastern or African group, the Suriname group, and the Caribbean group, this last being broadly divided further into the Eastern Caribbean, the Western Caribbean, and the North American. This is a gross over-simplification, but it reflects the diversity which exists, and with which issues of literacy must contend. A more detailed discussion is found in Hancock (1987). The extent of the differences may be illustrated by giving the equivalents of the sentence ‘I don’t know where your brother found his books’ in one Creole from each of these groups:

1. Eastern (African): Krio: a noh no usai una broda bin fen im buk dem
2. Suriname (South America): Sranan: mi no sabi ope a brada fu unu ben feni den buku fu en 3. Western (1. Eastern Caribbean): Antigua:  mi no no we allyu breda min fain i buk dem (2. Western Caribbean): Jamaica: mi no nuo a wepaat unu breda en fain fi im buk dem
4. North American:  Texas Seminole:  mi na no wiseh hunnuh breda bin fain i buk dem

Examples like this, however, give a false impression of stability, since with almost no exceptions wherever Creole is spoken, English is spoken too by some section of the same population, and is used in the classrooms and in other official capacities. The result is that for speakers who come into contact with that language, their Creole, whether consciously or unconsciously, is affected to a greater or lesser degree by intrusions from it. This is a characteristic of such bilingual societies, and a great deal of work has been done to try to define its consequences in linguistic terms. Some creolists see the situation as a continuum, with Creole and English at the two ends, gradually shading from one to the other between these extremes. Others maintain that there really exists a set of separate grammars side by side along this spectrum, with the speaker being able to shift along the range from one register to the next. Linguists speak of decreolisation, that is the gradual loss of Creole forms and structures as they are replaced by their equivalents from English, and see this as being inevitable - even desirable. 1 prefer to call this metropolitanisation, and not to regard it as a necessary process. But however the situation is described, the fact is that not only are there many quite distinct dialects of Caribbean Creole, but there is also a considerable range of varieties of each of these dialects in each location. Do we then treat each as a separate entity, or else attempt to create an artificial ‘union’ variety?

If the principal argument for fostering the vernacular speech in this way is that it embodies the soul of its speakers and reflects their identity and expresses their way of life more adequately than English can, then a new, artificial variety defeats this purpose quite soundly. Clearly there is little to be gained from creating a pan-Caribbean language; indeed, it can be argued that English already fulfils that purely practical role. Since, with the exceptions of the African and Suriname groups the other Creoles share considerable mutual intelligibility, it seems more logical to develop teaching materials which present an overview of these different dialects so that speakers of any one can be made familiar with those of any of the others. In this way, locally-produced vernacular literature can be retained in the original language and be more widely circulated and appreciated. Without a doubt, the study of Creoles, and especially the Caribbean Creoles, should be made an integral part of the West Indian educational curriculum. I should add too that when Creole is taught as a distinct and separate system from English, and their differences rather than their similarities stressed, students are much more likely to be successful in keeping the two apart. As long as Creole is presented as a ‘bad’ version of English, confusion must result. Assignments in Creole should be given, and graded as rigorously as those given in English; and just as creolisms in English are corrected by the teacher, attention should also be brought to the intrusions of anglicisms into Creole.

This leads to a second, and more difficult, issue: if each of the national Creoles is to be developed separately, which variety of each should be chosen? Urban dialects differ from the rural; eastern Jamaican differs considerably from western Jamaican, and northern Antiguan from southern. Berbice Creolese is different from the Demarara dialect; the elderly speak differently from the young, Africans differently from East Indians, and so on. Such diversity is not, of course, restricted to the Caribbean; it is natural to all languages. The same could be said about English, for instance. But English has evolved a more-or-less Standardised written variety, which few people actually speak in informal contexts, but which they are taught in the classroom to read and be able to use. Standard English has grown out of the dialects of the educated: the writers and politicians who gravitated to the London area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and who did most of the writing and talking. And so it seems to be with the emergence of written Creole; it seems very much to be in the hands of the novelists and poets, and perhaps this is inevitable, for although it may be argued that such people constitute an educated elite, and are thus to some extent remote from the folk, they are also more likely to be aware of the formal differences between the vernacular and international written English.

The more basilectal, or conservative, any Creole is, the more it will have in common with other, related Creoles and the less it will be like English. The selection of such a variety would have the advantage of keeping the two systems, Creole and English, more distinct from each other and consequently not so susceptible to cross-interference. The phonology of the basilectal varieties is also more easily represented orthographically since its inventory of vowels is usually smaller, and it is worth considering that a non-English-based spelling system for the Creole would also serve to emphasise its distinctiveness from English.

It may be objected to that conservative or “deep”, Creole is not representative of the majority of speakers, and is associated with a lack of formal education and sophistication. These are valid points, since they are very real feelings for very many people; but written English is not the speech of the majority either, and the fact that the use of Deep Creole may raise a smile is a reflection of social attitudes resulting from the notion that the more like English one’s speech is, the better it must be. This kind of colonial brainwashing is counter-productive, and must be dealt with as a part of the overall Creole language programme. Language planners for Hindi, or Indonesian, or Hebrew, among others, have not hesitated to draw upon older, even obsolete forms to tailor them to the requirements of modern technology, and have seen this preferable to the wholesale adoption of foreign (and usually English) vocabulary.

Whatever standard variety is decided upon, it will not be the natural speech of the entire population. No speech community in the world could make such a claim. The only alternatives are to have several different standards, which is hardly practical, or to have no written standard at all. The latter possibility has its adherents, who see no reason to cultivate the vernacular when written English is already available; but if nothing else, this would ensure that the capacity for written expression would remain the domain of just a few, who would nevertheless continue to represent Creole speech anyway in their writings, usually only direct speech, in an impressionistic, English-based orthography.

ROMANI

Those who feel that reducing Creole to a standard written form takes something away from the language, would find considerable support among the Romani-speaking population. Not only has there been traditional opposition to literacy itself, but it is popularly believed by some that it is impossible to write Romani at all, and that learning to do so can lead to sickness.

I have in my files an article which appeared some years ago entitled ‘Cure for a Gypsy curse’. Although the title panders to popular stereotyping, the ‘curse’ referred to is illiteracy. The opening line begin “It is essential that Gypsy children ... should go to school’ (Gibbard 1973, p.30). Practically without exception, all of the literature dealing with literacy assumes automatically that it must be the desired goal. Among many Gypsy groups, however, too much formal learning is seen not only 10 be debilitating, but as a threat to the Romani way of life. There are a number of reasons for this: ‘formal’ education is usually in terms of the majority culture, making no concession to the often quite divergent values of the Romani-speaking students in the classroom. Also, because most schools are not now segregated according to sex, parents are extremely reluctant to permit their children to share a classroom with non-Gypsies because of the risk of romantic involvement.

While in the USA at least, a basic knowledge of reading and writing is increasingly becoming considered a practical asset - for example when consulting road maps or street and business signs, or for writing one’s own receipts - it is commonly felt that women should not be privy to these skills. At the present time, the majority of Romani Americans have only basic literary skills, although the situation is changing. What this change will mean to the maintenance of traditional Romani values, however, remains to be seen. From the sociologist’s point of view, the differences between a literate and a non-literate society are crucial:

In non-literate society, every social situation cannot but bring the individual into contact with the group’s patterns of thought, feeling and action: the choice is between the cultural tradition - or solitude. In a literate society, however, and quite apart from the difficulties arising from the scale and complexity of the ‘high’ literate tradition, the mere fact that reading and writing are normally solitary activities means that insofar as the dominant cultural tradition is a literate one, it is very easy to avoid (Goody and Watt 1968, pp.59-60).

For many Gypsy groups, the maintenance of a non-literate tradition has become institutionalised, serving as a means of sustaining non-acculturation. This operates in four specific ways (adapted from Hancock 1975, pp.43-48):

1. The minimisation of time spent in school reduces proportionately the influence of the teacher’s set of values on the Gypsy child, and effectively eliminates peer-group pressure from the other children - two of the most pervasive forces in the socialisation process;
2. Illiteracy hinders any socialisation in the direction of the majority culture through the written word, and forestalls identification with historical and cultural heroes through books and novels;
3. Illiteracy strengthens the likelihood that Romani will remain the first language of the individual, with the resulting reinforcement of group values which occurs when he speaks mainly to and in the company of other Romani speakers, and lastly;
4. Illiteracy curtails defection to the majority culture via the occupational route, as (within the non-Gypsy milieu) only the most menial, physically strenuous and low-paying jobs are available to illiterates.

There continues to be found among non-Gypsy scholars of Romani culture the type of individual who feels that such resistance to acculturation is right and proper, and that Gypsies who do not conform to the ‘urzigeunerisch’ stereotype have lost something of their Gypsiness; the literature, both scholarly and journalistic, is full of essays expressing disappointment on the pan of the observer that the Gypsies they are reporting on wear suits, or live in houses, or are able to read and write. And yet it must be remembered that Romanies have survived by constantly adapting to the changing environment - indeed by staying a couple of steps ahead of the society around them, while maintaining the linguistic and cultural core to which the ethnic identity is anchored. If staying ahead means acquiring literacy, this will be accommodated as needed.

Since the end of the Second World War, in which upwards of a million Romanies were murdered, the nationalist movement has gathered considerable force, one of the most significant achievements being admittance of the International Romani Union to the United Nations Organisation in 1979. While this has lent volume to the Gypsy voice, and has brought about the beginnings of positive change where our protests formerly fell on deaf ears, it has also thrown Gypsy politics into the international arena, with the result that communication on a world-wide scale has become essential. This in turn has meant that the only common means of achieving this, i.e. through the ethnic language, has become a crucial issue, although in his extensive study entitled Linguistic Minorities in Western Europe, Meic Stephens (1976, p. xiii) naively decided not to include Romani:  “... the Rom have also been omitted, because in Western Europe their situations are sui generis and their problems neither linguistic nor territorial.”

Some years ago, I prepared a study dealing with the problems of creating a standardised dialect of Romani (Hancock 1975, 1977). The historical and social discussion may be summarised then as follows:

1.  Because of both historical and contemporary factors, not least anti-social pressures from the    surrounding societies which continue to divide the Romani-speaking populations, there are today a great many widely differing dialects of that language, and as many groups socially isolated from, and even hostile to, each other.
2. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to achieving political and cultural unity is the lack of communication among the various Romani groups in Europe, Australia and the Americas.
3. It may be assumed that progress towards reunification would be more easily made if a common dialect were available to all groups. The achievement of linguistic reunification would be [he first step toward reunification as a people.

The problems associated with these suppositions were summarised in (Hancock 1977) follows:

4. No single dialect spoken anywhere is so close to the common protoform that it may be adopted without modification; in other words, whatever dialect is chosen will have to be adapted to a more acceptable international form, especially lexically, phonologically and orthographically. It may be necessary to cultivate two standardised dialects: one for northern and one for southern Europe.
5. Using existing means of education, the propagation of such a Standard or standards will be very unevenly achieved. Settled, already literate Rom, such as predominate in eastern European countries, will have a far better opportunity to acquire the dialect(s). For illiterate Rom, the task would be much harder.
6. Not all Rom everywhere will ever learn, or be disposed to learn such a dialect. This will create a ‘linguistic elite’ consisting only of those who have learnt the new international standard. The rights of those whose way of life or whose attitude toward literacy keeps them separate from the literate community must not be jeopardised as a result of their circumstances.

So far, achievement in this direction has been slow; while the number of literate Rom continues to grow, the dialects and orthographies they use reflect a great many different backgrounds. If a Rom has learnt to read at all, it has been in the national language of his country, which is why it is so widely held that Romani can’t be written: a person familiar only with English spelling conventions, for example, would not be able to represent Romani phonology very accurately in writing using them. An elite, however, has begun to emerge: leaders in the Romani Union have such non-traditional occupations as journalists, lawyers, engineers and even medical doctors, professions which certainly alienate them from some sections of the Gypsy population. It is to be regretted that elitism is seen in terms of the values traditionally associated with western materialism, and that being ‘educated’ is automatically interpreted as being schooled; individuals extensively knowledgeable in Romani medicine, or oral literature, or history, may be seen as wise, or venerable, but unless they had been to school, never educated.

At present, while Romani is the common medium of written communication, each writer in each country tends to use his own dialect and his own spelling conventions even when communicating internationally. Clearly this is far from satisfactory, although it is becoming apparent that as such communication increases, those using the language are beginning to make concessions to the other writers and their dialects.

Lexical items with too local an application are avoided; spelling seems to be gravitating towards a modified Serbian system, probably because the greatest number of Romani-language publications used to be produced in that country and in Sweden, which has already published several books in Romani using a Slavic-type orthography as well. The success or failure of the new official orthography approved by the voting body at the Fourth World Romani Congress in Poland in 1990 remains to be seen.

For both Creole and Romani, the emergence of written standards and uniform orthographies seems to be in the hands of the writers rather than of the academicians; the latter have had less success in the long run than the former, and perhaps this is as it should be. Language, we should remember, is a spontaneous, human, creative art; to shape it on paper into something too remote from natural speech is to stifle its capabilities. Human language does not exist in the abstract, nor does it independently live, until it is given life in the mouths of its speakers.

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