Alphabet

   It seems probable that the Gypsies did not bring any writing system with them when they came to Europe. The alphabet given in Jean-Paul Clébert's book The Gypsies is spurious. Publications in Romani in the 20th century have used the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. The first World Romany Congress recommended a broad phonetic alphabet based on Latin letters, and most literature produced since then has been in the Latin alphabet.

   The alphabet of the first World Romany Congress was as follows:

   a b c ch d e f g h hi j k kh l m n o p ph r s s t th u v z z

   At the second Congress, h was replaced by x. At the fourth World Romany Congress in Warsaw in 1990, a writing system elaborated by linguist Marcel Cortiade was adopted. Its purpose was to enable speakers of different dialects to use the same spelling system to represent different dialect pronunciations. The presidium of the International Romani Union approved the alphabet on 7 April 1990. Later, a meeting of the Language Commission of the Union, held during the Helsinki Summer School, recommended that no change be made in the alphabet for a period of 10 years. It has been adopted in the Netherlands and Romania for educational purposes and has been used in a number of publications.

   The alphabet accepted at the fourth Congress was as follows:

   a b c c ç ch d e f g h i j k kh l m n o p ph r rr s s t th 9 u v x z z 3

   The letters ç and 0 are used morphophonemically, that is, they always represent the same grammatical form but are pronounced differently. So, in rakles0e (to the boy) and raklen0e (to the boys), 0 is pronounced as t in the former word and d in the latter. The letters ch and 3 are pronounced differently according to the dialect. Most speakers of Vlah dialects would read them as shy and zhy (approximately the sound in English treasure), while speakers of Balkan dialects would read them as aspirated tch and (English) j.