Cingeneyiz.org: There are different peripatetic societies in many parts of the world. These peripatetics use secret languages and language compositions. We are trying to understand the criterion which make these languages real, and what kind of sociological conditions affect the promotion of these languages?
To begin, we must keep in mind that we are talking about information in a period in which communication within cultures was primarily oral, and transactions were primarily oral. Therefore, there was a need for a very strong differenciation within oral conversation, in order to express different modes of communication. Today we can use fax, email and various other kinds of online orderers. But in the past, everything had to be done with different forms of verbal communication. As a result, one of the typical elements in peripatetic communities was what we now refer to as "tightknit communities."
These communities were small, and the people within them knew one another personally. There was a very high degree of trust and dependency among members. Additıonally, there was an enormous distance between the tightknit communities and the outside world. This gap between insiders and outsiders was much larger than divisions in other kinds of communities, because the dependence on family and other members of the community was much greater. These factors had a huge influence on language in particular, which became symbolic of the very tightly knit groups. When business people within the tightknit communities went out to clients to engage in economic transactions, they were always accompanied by one of their own people. They often needed to be able to communicate and coordinate transactions in front of people who were not part of their group. And so to create meaning, to be able to have a quick and coherent mode of communication, was very important. It was especially important due to the informal nature of the transactions. Nowadays, when corporations get together and negotiate, they seek time off, and they will say, "can I fırst talk to my colleagues seperately?" When trade unions talk to their colleagues, they say, "Wait just a minute, and İ will call you back." But in these kinds of traditional transactions that peripatetic groups carried out, transactions were always face to face, and they didn't have time off. So there was a need to be able to quickly coordinate the key issues of the message. So this was fulfilling an economic need, but it was also fulfillıng a social need by flagging identity, via slang expressions. What we call slang expressions, were basically used by groups of people who shared some kind of social solidarity, by using words that are fashionable among themselves, in order to reassurt their membership in the group. In slang groups, group affiliation was volatile, and it came and went. However, within tight peripatetic communities', group affiliation was what you were born into and you spent your whole life within the group. And that created a much more stable set of lexical words compared to slang langauges, whıch kept changing all the time. We find these kinds of phenomenon across various groups in societies; whether it's students, or people who share a particular occupation, or even families who share certain terms of endearment. It's just on a more intensive and more prolonged scale. So that's the sociological background. In terms of the linguistic structures, there were basically two main options that people had. They could either take lexicon from another language, if they had access to lexicon in another language. And those that had access to lexicon languages were either descendance of groups who migrated from elsewhere and had used the language before -- some older generations used their own language, Or if they came into contact with a group who migrated, such as the abdaldili, who had alot of words from domari, from kurdish, and from other languages
Cingeneyiz.org: Persian language
Yes. And from Romani. Or many words in European slang came from Latin and late Latin, which was used in harbors in the Mediterranean so these were all options to take words from another language. Or else you could take your own language and distort words or change them, and there was usually two ways of changing these words. You could either change the sound patterns, for example, by switching around syllables. In France there is a very known slang called "back slang," in which words are read backwards, so arabs are beurs (arabs spelled backwards in French) or you could add syllables, or add sounds to the words or change certain sounds. So the İrish travellers for instance, changed toilet to groilet. Or you could either can either change the sound of words or you could change the semantics, the meaning of words, by taking words that have a related meaning, and using them. So for example, "stalks for legs;" "stalks," so stalks are basically "socks," so it's used as a metaphor. Sometimes there are combinations of all of these different things so some secrect languages have different sounds, and different meaning distortions, and loan words, and everything together, so it varies. But Romani has nothing to do with all of that. People somethimes treat Romani as a secret language. Romani is not a secret language, it has nothing to do with all of that.
Cingeneyiz.org: If Romani is not a secret language, what are the main differences between Romani and the secret languages ?
Romani has no connection with secret languages. Romani is just like Armenian or Lazca. It's a language of people who move from one place to another. For example, when Armenians moved from Turkey to France, they settled in France, just like the Romani people who went from İndia to Europe, and continued to speak Indian language. The fact that they are also peripatetic is an added fact to their history, but the language is not there as a peripatetic langauge. The only way there is a connection is in those situations in which the Romani people lost their language, such as in Britain or in Scandinavia.
Cingeneyiz.org: Anglo Romani?
Anglo Romani is a kind of Romani. Where the language has been lost. So the parent generatıon in the 19th century shifted to English. But we treat Romani vocabulary as an in-group language.
Cingeneyiz.org: I Think it is also true for Geygel language.
Yes that's possible.
Cingeneyiz.org: They use Romani lexicon but Turkish grammar.
Yes, exactly. It happens in Scandinavia as well and it happens in Spain and in Basque country. So the lexicon is reserved, and then it becomes one of the secret languages that are based on foreign lexicon. Thats the only connection between Romani and secret languages.
Cingeneyiz.org: What do you think about the hate crimes targeting Gypsy people around Europe?
It's bad. What do you mean? In general or why right now?
Cingeneyiz.org: Yes, why right now?
I am not sure, whether it is true that it's surfacing right now. I think we have more awareness and we now have better networks of communication that monitor the situation of Romani people. So we know more, and we hear more about what is going on. That's why there are simply more reports. I don't think that there are more hate crimes against Romani people than there used to be. In parts of some countries like Hungary, there is more violence because 20 years after the fall of Communism, there was at first a lot of hope, which was followed by a very large wave of hate crime in 1990-1991 during the transiton to democracy. It was much more intense then than it is today. People tend to forget. But, I used to work for Romani organization 20 years ago and I remember very intensively how many reports on hate crime we had. If you go back and look at news databases from 20 years ago, I think you will see that in Romania, the Czech Repuclic, Hungary, and even Poland, there was a lot more violence per day than there is now. But I think what is happening in countries like Hungary nowadays, is that now there is a dissapointment with the EU. You know for many many years there was at least this kind hope for democracy and a hope of joining the EU. After joining the EU people saw that problems had not been solved and there were still problems, especially economic problems. So people looking for new radical solutions and turned to nationalism. I think that is what is now happening in Hungary specifically. In places like Italy and Ireland what is happening is that since the expansion of the EU, there are a large number of Romani immigrants. The presence of Romani people provokes the right wing in those countries, who speak out against Romani people, which agitates the press, who in turn put politicians under pressure to act.
And politicians are as racist or not as other people. I don't think they're more racist, but under pressure to act, obviously they wil go againts the Gypsies rather than against their own people. And I think that's what has been happening in Italy in particular and probably in Greece. Some years ago, there was this pressure caused by immigrants who would arrive and be in public, and then the government doesn't want to be seen supporting that. But of course by putting pressure on the Roma, they're adding to the hate atmosphere. They are legitimizing the atmosphere of hate. So more radical groups go and attack people. And that's happening partly in Britain as well today. Not on a large scale, but in certain places. The press are reacting very histerically, and blaming all of the crime on Roma. The government doesn't want to be seen doing nothing, so they try to find radical measures to take against the Roma. And that legitimizes hate, and hate crime at that kind of level. It's only in Turkey that it's going in the opposite direction. The Prime minister is actually coming to visit the Roma, and giving them legitimacy, but of course the context is very different.
Cingeneyiz.org: Do you believe are there any possibility for peripatetic communities to save themselves against discrimination with an international organization for peripatetic communities? We are asking you this question because there are too many peripatetic communities in Turkey, and they face similar kind of discrimination with a generic term çingene. And we are searching for these kinds of possibilities.
I think there are two different types of answers to the question. One is an academic answer, which is not the right answer in any case, but I will give it just because that is my perspective. The academic answer is that there is nothing really in common between peripatetic communities and Romani people, except that some Romani people have a history of being peripatetics, but many of them don't. I mean it depends how you define peripatetic to some extent, but certainly in terms of moving around, most Romani people have been settled for many generations, and many Romani people are becoming integrated, and abondoning traditional occupations. And occupation is not anymore a defining measure of most of the Romani community in many places. Today I would not call Romani people a peripatetic community. They are of peripatetic origin, yes, but they are not today a peripatetic community. And so ethnically they have nothing in common with most other paripatetic communities, and they also don't share a culture. So in terms of what is important for Romani communities to assert themselves, if you talk about representation, pride in their culture, pride in their heritage, and in their language -- the ability to develop their language, none of that is shared with either the Irish travellers or the Abdallar, it has nothing to do with them at all. The only thing where you could say that there are points in common is discrimination, and that is an issue of the political awareness that people have, it's not an academic issue. So we can go on saying forever, they do or they dont have anything in common historically. If people feel that they connect, then it's their right to come together and form a group together. But on the other hand if they don't feel that they belong together there is no point forcing them together. Now what the Council of Europe did, is force the Roma to go together with the travellers. This construction called the European Roma and Traveler Forum is very odd because it really represents only Romani people. There aren't any other traveler communities in it. And the Council of Europe simply for reasons of terminological bureaucracy, insisted on having the word "traveler" there. But certainly the Irish travelers don't feel represented by a Romani organization, and the Romani organization doesn't feel any connections. Now, the problem is that globally these things look diffrently than they are locally. So there are certain places in England, for instance, where English Gypsies and Irish travellers live side by side. Many of them also intermarry. Many of them have had connections for many generations. So even though they still constitute different groups, of course they feel an affinity, and they have similar problems of discrimination, of caravan sites, of logistics, education; and the differences are minimized by the fact that the Romani people have lost their language so they speak English. The Irish people have lost their language which was Irish, and they also speak English. So basically the education problems are the problems of logistics. How do you educate people when they travel, or how do you educate them when they don't want to send people to secondary school because they're afraid of mixtures. So how do you still educate them? That's a shared logistic problem . İt's not a problem of having a different language to teach in school or anything like that. So in those regions in England you could say that English Gypsies and Irish travelers basically have the same interests. But still it's not for us to say if they come up and say "we want to have an organization together." To this day I am not familiar with a single organization in Britain where Irish Travellers and English Gypsies say "we want to be together." They always represent their interests seperately. Because the English Gypsies now absorb many Roma from Eastern Europe. They feel a very strong affinity with them. The Irish Travellers still have family in Ireland. They go back and forth between Ireland and England. So even though there are many things in common, there are also many differences between them.
Cingeneyiz.org: I see..
But who are we to exclude them. If there is a situation in some place where in a particular community...I don't know in Urfa, or whatever, you know Dom, and Rom, and Lom, and Abdal "we all have the same problems so lets get to together," who are we to say "no, you are different people." It's not our right, it's up to them. But it has to be at the local level because what we cannot do is say, "you have to talk to the others, because you are all the same people. " It depends on how they see themselves.
Cingeneyiz.org: We use the word "Cingene" as an umbrella term. There is no Gypsy in Turkey ethnically. As you said before there are to many different peripatetic groups in Turkey. Not only Rom, Lom, Dom also Abdals, Geygels and so on.
Like Yörüks..
Cingeneyiz.org: No, Yörüks are pastoral nomads, but there are some peripatetic groups and commercial nomads. They live in, generally, similar neighborhoods together. They face the same kind of discrimination. And generally, after modernization, after industrialization, they lost their traditonal occupations, but they started to do some jobs together in the informal sector of the economy. So many of them live in similar life style conditions, and they face discrimination because they have been identified as Çingene. So we believe that we should represent these people under this generic term, and we should ethically represent all of them separately. We also represent Roma people as an ethnic community.
So you represent all of them collectively without trying to blur the distinctions between them. That makes sense, but as I said before I dont feel that that's wrong in any way. But I feel like it has to have some kind of local legitimacy. If it does then fine. If these people come to you and they say, "Ok, that's interesting what you're doing and thank you," then that's good. In Germany as you know there are two large groups called the Roma and Sinties, and there are actually more. They insist that in their offical documents they're called "Rom and Sinti" and "distinguished." From my academic point of view they are both one group. They speak the same language, just different dialects. They have a similar history, they just immigrated at different points. So basically what distinguishes them is different family affiliations at the level of the larger clan, thats mainly the difference. And there is small differences of course between the clans, and cultures, and how long the skirts are; are they this long or that long? Or are they this color or that color? So I treat Sinti as Roma because they have the same language. But the sintiis are very insistent that they are very seperate. You can't ignore that. İt's self-representation. In academic, yeah. I can write a book and nobody forces me to write Sinti. I can say the Romani dialects of Germany, the Romani dialects of Hungary. I can do what I want. I have my academic freedom. And that's how I teach my students that they are one of the groups. But I can't go and have self representation for them if it is not agreeable for them.
Cingeneyiz.org: In Turkey these people have seperate identities. For example, Abdal people identify themselves as Abdal, but they also know that the others call them Çingene. So this creates a collective identity, but we never say that they have the same ethnic identity. They have seperate ethnic identity but they also share a collective social identity. This is what we're trying to present on our web page.
Yes, but again, it has to be done locally, one cannot not generalize it globally. Just like the discussion about Japanese Gypsies. It's like calling the Chienese in Indonesia "the Jews of Indonesia." It doesn't work. There's limits to how far you can go and generalize the labels. You can say the Chinese in Indonesia are merchants who immigrated, and they have histroic newtorks, so they're the Jews of Indonesia, but they're not.
Cingeneyiz.org: I also come from a peripatetic family. My father's family are Roma from Bulgaria, and my mother's family members are Abdals and Lom people. They have lived in the same neigborhood for one or two hundred years. This is also a reality for too many people in Turkey. In some neighborhoods in İstanbul, generally people identfy themselves as Roma, but some of their ancestors are Abdals, or Geygel people.
What you are saying basically is that there has been always an interface between these groups. It is similar to England again where there's the Irish travellers and English Gypsies. I often tell an anecdot which somebody once told me when I visited a Romani Gypsy family in England. I asked them about the other travelers, and they said, "Well the Irish travelers, we don't really know anything about them. We don't have any contact with them. If they come up to our caravan site, we go away to another site. We keep away from them because they cause trouble, so I can't really tell you anything about them, but my father-in-law is one." So his wife's father is an Irish Traveler, which means he married an Irish Traveler, but he doesn't know anything about them. But there's no contradiction, because there is a very clear line, the line can be crossed. If you cross the line then you belong to the other side. But the line's still maintained even if you've crossed it. There is no contradiction. So it's a matter of perspective. And again I don't think these things can be put together, or designed on the drawing board. They need to be done in reality. But one way or another we cannot say, "You can never represent peripatetics together because they are seperate groups." Nor can you say, "We should always represent peripatetics together because they are one group." It really depends very much on the context. You know the story of the Askhali people in Macedonia, which is completely ridiculous. I mean it's clear that they are Roma by descent. And It's clear that they are Roma who lost their language. And then they lobbied and got recognition as Egyptians. Now every scholar knows that there is no connection to Egypt whatsoever. That all it is, is an attempt to distance themselves from the others and to have their own group representation. And it's purely politically motivated by the persons who are responsible for that. But that's the reality. So you know it's the same with other issues of language, ethnicity, and in some places people are more or less aware of certain identities, and it changes over time. Why are Austrians Austrian? And why are Germans German? Fifty years ago all the Austrians said we're Germans, and the Slovenians said we're Austrians. Things like that are dynamic.
Cingeneyiz.org: What do you think about our web page www.cingeneyiz.org?
Your website is very impressive and is certainly the most comprehensive and uptodate source of information on Gypsies in Turkey. I would have wished to see more material on the Romani language, and more links to pages in Romani, so that users of your page might be encouraged to safeguard the language.
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