Domari

Domari is the Indo-Aryan language of the Dom, itinerant communities scattered from Turkey and the Caucasus through the Levant to Egypt and Iran; it is a distant cousin of Romani rather than its ancestor, the two groups having left India separately. The only variety described in depth is the Jerusalem dialect recorded by Yaron Matras in the 1990s, where an inherited Indic core (pani 'water', xast 'hand', kuri 'house') survives inside a grammar saturated with Palestinian Arabic — conjunctions, prepositions, numerals above five and most modal auxiliaries are borrowed wholesale. Nouns keep Indic case endings while verbs freely take Arabic-derived aspect and modality markers, making Domari one of the most heavily contact-restructured Indo-Aryan systems on record. It has no standard orthography and is written, when written at all, in Latin transcription or occasionally in Arabic or Hebrew script; verbs are cited here as bare roots, the form used in Matras's vocabulary. UNESCO classes Domari as severely endangered: in Jerusalem fewer than 200 people still speak it, and most of the community's roughly 1,200 members now grow up speaking Arabic.

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