Bohemian Romani

Bohemian Romani or Bohemian Romany is a dialect of Romani (a European Indo-Aryan language) formerly spoken by the Romani people of Bohemia, the western part of today's Czech Republic. It became extinct after World War II, due to extermination of most of its speakers in Nazi concentration camps.

Speakers

Before their extermination in the 1940s, speakers of Bohemian Romani, the Bohemian Romanies, were one of several nomadic populations of Bohemia. They led a peripatetic (or semi-peripatetic) way of life, travelling around the country (especially during the warmer seasons of the year) and offering their services to the sedentary population of the Bohemian countryside. They were mostly horse-dealers, peddlars, tinners, and entertainers.

The first ancestors of Bohemian Romanies probably arrived in Bohemia in the 16th and 17th centuries, from Slovakia via Moravia. Small-scale migration of Romanies from Slovakia to the Czech Lands (as well as backwards) continued throughout the following centuries. The Bohemian Romanies have always been a numerically insignificant minority. In 1939, there were ca. 6,000 people of different Romani groups in the territory of today's Czech Republic (Nečas 1995). Of these, a smaller fraction, perhaps some 2,000 people, lived in Bohemia. The proportion of different Romani groups in this figure is unknown, though the estimate of 500-1,500 of Bohemian Romanies cannot be wildly off the mark.