TheRomani language has for most of its history been an entirely oral language, with no written form in common use. Although the first example of written Romani dates from 1542,^[1] it is not until the twentieth century that vernacular writing by nativeRomani people arose.

Printed anthologies of Romani folktales and poems began in the 20th century in Eastern Europe, using the respective national scripts (Latin or Cyrillic).^[2] Written Romani in the 20th century used the writing systems of their respective host societies, mostlyLatin alphabets (Romanian,Italian,French, etc.).

Currently, there is no single standard orthography used by both scholars and native speakers. Efforts of language planners have been hampered by the significant dialectal divisions in Romani: the absence of standard phonology, in turn, makes the selection of a single written form problematic.

In an effort to overcome this, during the 1980s and 1990sMarcel Courthiade proposed a model for orthographic unification based on the adoption of a meta-phonological orthography, which "would allow dialectal variation to be accommodated at the phonological and morpho-phonological level".^[1] This system was presented to theInternational Romani Union in 1990, who adopted it as the organization's "official alphabet". This recognition by the International Romani Union allowed Courthiade's system to qualify for funding from theEuropean Commission.

Despite being used in several publications, such as the grammar of Romani compiled by Gheorghe Sarău^[3] and the Polish publicationInformaciaqo lil,^[4] the IRU standard has yet to find a broad base of support from Romani writers. One reason for the reluctance to adopt this standard, according to Canadian Rom Ronald Lee, is that the proposed orthography contains a number of specialised characters not regularly found on European keyboards, such asθ andʒ.^[5]

Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thusRomanian inRomania,Hungarian inHungary and so on. A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed spontaneously by native speakers for use online and through email.^[1]

Descriptivelinguistics has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription.^[1] Despite small differences between individual linguists in the representation of certainphonemes, most adhere to a system which Hancock termsPan-Vlax.^[4]

The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography.^[1] There are three main systems that are likely to be encountered: thePan-Vlax system, theInternational Standard and various Anglicised systems.^[4]

In most recent descriptive literature, a variety of orthography whichIan Hancock termsPan-Vlax will likely be used.^[4] This orthography is not a single standardised form, but rather a set of orthographical practices which exhibit a basic "core" of shared graphemes and a small amount of divergence in several areas. The Pan-Vlax script is based on the Latin script, augmented by the addition of severaldiacritics common to the languages of eastern Europe, such as thecaron. Sometimes stress is indicated with anacute accent.

In the following table, the most common variants of the graphemes are shown. The phonemes used in the table are somewhat arbitrary and are not specifically based on any one dialect (for example, the phoneme denoted/d͡ʒ/ in the table can be realised as/ʒ/,/ʐ/ or/ɟ/, depending on dialect):

The use of the above graphemes is relatively stable and universal, taking into account dialectal mergers and so on. However, in certain areas there is somewhat more variation. A typically diverse area is in the representation of sounds not present in most varieties of Romani. For example, the centralised vowel phonemes of several varieties of Vlax and Xaladitka, when they are indicated separately from the non-centralised vowels, can be represented usingə,ъ oră.^[4] Another particularly variant area is the representation ofpalatalised consonants, which are absent from a number of dialects. Some variant graphemes for/tʲ/ includetj,ty,ć,čj andt᾿.^[1] Finally, the representation of the second rhotic, which in several dialects has been merged with/r/, tends to vary betweenř,rr, andrh, and sometimes evengh, with the first two being the most frequently found variants.^[4]

TheInternational Standard orthography, as devised by Marcel Courthiade and adopted by the International Romani Union, uses similar conventions to the Pan-Vlax system outlined above. Several of the differences are simply graphical, such as replacingcarons with acute accents—transformingč š ž intoć ś ź—and acute accents withgrave accents. However, its most distinctive feature is the use of "meta-notations", which are intended to cover cross-dialectal phonological variation, particularly in degrees of palatalisation; "morpho-graphs", which are used to represent the morphophonological alternation of case suffixes^[6] in different phonological environments;^[7] and adouble dot (¨) to indicate a centralized vowel.

The "meta-notations" arećh,ʒ, and the caron (ˇ; namedćiriklo after the word for bird), the realisation of which varies by dialect. The first two are respectively pronounced as/t͡ʃʰ/ and/d͡ʒ/ in the first stratum but/ɕ/ and/ʑ/ in the third stratum.^[8] The caron on a vowel represents palatalisation;ǒ andǎ are pronounced/o/ and/a/ inLovaricka, but/jo/ and/ja/ inKalderash.^[4]

The three "morpho-graphs" areç,q. andθ, which represent the initial phonemes of a number of case suffixes, which are realised/s/,/k/ and/t/ after avowel and/ts/,/ɡ/ and/d/ after anasal consonant.

The English-based orthography commonly used in North America is, to a degree, an accommodation of the Pan-Vlax orthography to English-language keyboards, replacing those graphemes with diacritics with digraphs, such as the substitution ofts ch sh zh forc č š ž.^[4] This particular orthography seems to have arisen spontaneously as Romani speakers have communicated using email, a medium in which graphemes outside theLatin-1charset have until recently been difficult to type.^[1] In addition, it is this orthography which is recommended for use by Romani scholar and activistRonald Lee.^[5]

Romani in Macedonia is written with the following alphabet:^[9]

This alphabet is used in the educational system in Macedonia for Romani-speaking students.

Kepeski & Jusuf (1980) noted that the following alphabet is used by Romani people in Macedonia and Serbia (Kosovo):^[10]

Finnish Romani (or Finnish Kalo) is written with the following alphabet:^[11]

The letters in parentheses are only used in loanwords and are therefore not always part of the alphabet. The digraphsdž,kh,ph,th, andtš are used, but are not letters of the alphabet.Š andŽ are only used in these digraphs.

InGreece, for instance, Romani is mostly written with the Greek alphabet (although very little seems to be written in Romani in Greece).^[13]

ThePerso-Arabic script has also been used, for example, inIran.^[13][14] More importantly, the first periodical produced by Roma for Roma was printed in the Arabic script in the 1920s inEdirne inTurkey. It was calledLaćo (لاچو), meaning "good".^[13]

• Writing system
• Romani language

• Hodge, Nathanael (2011),Romani Orthographies(PDF), University of Manchester, retrievedJanuary 28, 2022{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Matras, Yaron (2005)."The future of Romani: Toward a policy of linguistic pluralism"(PDF).Roma Rights Quarterly.1:31–44.
• Meyer, Anna-Maria (2019). "The creation of orthographies for Romani by means of 'Slavic' alphabets". In Kempgen, Sebastian; Tomelleri, Vittorio Springfield (eds.).Slavic Alphabets and Identities(PDF) (in English, German, and Russian). Bamberg: Bamberg University Press. pp. 129–160.ISBN 978-3-86309-617-5.

• Romani language
• Latin alphabets
• Cyrillic alphabets
• Orthographies by language

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles containing Romani-language text
• CS1 foreign language sources (ISO 639-2)
• CS1 Hungarian-language sources (hu)
• CS1 French-language sources (fr)
• CS1 Spanish-language sources (es)
• CS1 German-language sources (de)
• CS1 Ukrainian-language sources (uk)
• CS1 Romanian-language sources (ro)
• CS1 Croatian-language sources (hr)
• CS1 Slovak-language sources (sk)
• CS1 Greek-language sources (el)
• CS1 Macedonian-language sources (mk)
• CS1 maint: location missing publisher
• CS1 Russian-language sources (ru)