Romani is a language of Indo-Aryan origin that is spoken in Europe by people known as gypsies (who usually refer to themselves as Rom). There are upwards of 3.5 million speakers of Romani. This book discusses the historical and linguistic origins of the Romani-speaking population. It examines in-depth the changes in the sound system, grammatical structure, and lexicon that led to the formation of Proto-Romani and Early Romani. The book surveys current issues in the study of Romani by examining the phonology, morphology, syntactic typology, and patterns of grammatical borrowing in the language, drawing on a comparative survey of the principal dialects. It offers a new model of dialect classification, describes the sociolinguistic situation of Romani, examines its contribution to other languages and slangs, and discusses recent and current codification attempts as well as changes in function and status. The 11 chapters are the following: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "Romani Dialects: A Brief Overview"; (3) "Historical and Linguistic Origins"; (4) "Descriptive Phonology"; (5) "Nominal Forms and Categories"; (6) "Verb Morphology"; (7) "Syntactic Typology"; (8) "Grammatical Borrowing"; (9) "Dialect Classification"; (10) "Romani Sociolinguistics"; and (11) "Language Planning and Codification." (Contains 9 figures, 10 tables, and approximately 450 references.) (SM)