Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy (Romani: romani ćhib) is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own.

According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 900,000 speakers),Balkan Romani (700,000),Carpathian Romani (500,000) and Sinti Romani (300,000).

Analysis of the Romani language has shown that it is closely related to those spoken in the central and northern Indian subcontinent. This linguistic relationship is believed to indicate the geographical origins of the Romani people (Roma, Sinti, etc.). Loanwords in Romani make it possible to trace the pattern of their migration westwards. They came originally from the Indian subcontinent or what is now northern India and parts of Pakistan. The Romani language is usually included in the Central Indo-Aryan languages (together with Western Hindi, etc.).

Arvind Kumar Singhal is a columnist for Business Standard (a financial news daily in India) who regularly writes the column, Marketmind appearing on alternate Thursdays. The column has been in circulation for 7 years and focuses on the pulse of the market in India.

Mr. Singhal is also the Managing Director of Technopak, a management consulting firm based out of Gurgaon.

Mr. Singhal has done his bachelors from University of Roorkee (Now IIT Roorkee) and his masters from UCLA, after which he worked DCM Group, VXL India and Modern suitings before founding Technopak in 1991.

The Romani are an ethnic group living mostly in Europe, who trace their origins to the Indian Subcontinent. Romani are widely known in the English-speaking world by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies).

They are known collectively in the Romani language as Romane or Rromane (depending on the dialect concerned) and also as Romany, Romanies, Romanis, Roma or Roms.

Romani are widely dispersed, with their largest concentrated populations in Europe, especially the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, followed by the Kale of Iberia and Southern France.

The Americas are also home to large numbers of Romani. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States; 800,000 in Brazil, to which Kale were deported by the government of Portugal during the colonial era; and in more recent migrations, Romani have also moved to other parts of the New World.

The Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two.

Yaron Matras is a linguist at the University of Manchester specializing in Romani and related languages. He is one of the most prominent English-language Romani linguist and the author of several pioneering studies. He edited Romani in Contact, a collection of papers presented at the First International Conference on Romani Linguistics in 1993.

Bio. from The University of Manchester.