ABSTRACT
Until well into the eighteenth century the gypsies were something of an enigma, both as regards their origins and their language. The very fact that they were popularly supposed to have come from Egypt (the word gypsy is a corruption of Egyptian) was enough to invest the language with mystery. It is now clear that the gypsies (the ethonym is roma) emigrated from India in a succession of waves towards the end of the first millennium AD. One of these waves proceeded via Iran into A natolia, South Russia, and the Balkans, to reach Western Europe by the fifteenth century, Britain by the sixteenth. A following wave seems to have taken a more southerly route via Iran, Syria, and the M editerranean into North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. By the twentieth century, groups of gypsies leading a more-or-less nomadic form of life were present in all European countries and in many other parts of the world, and the Romany language, originally a specific form of New Indo-Aryan, had been substantially differ entiated into two or three dozen dialects - a process in which contact with the languages of the host peoples played a crucial role.
