About Romao Paso

Romano Paso is a non-profit organization. It is the goal of Romano Paso to build and strengthen the bond among the different Romani groups as well as the non-Romani population. We believe strongly that integration is a two way road which we all must travel together. We say it is a two way road because we not only intend to inform non-Romani society of Romani culture and history, in order to combat harmful misunderstandings and sterio-types, but the Romani people as well.

Roma history in short

According to scholars, we are aware that the Romani people have left India ca 1000AD. Along the path into Europe, the Romani vocabulary grew by borrowing from Persian, Armenian, and Greek. As English borrowed from Greek and French, so has Romani done so with other languages. The significant difference however is that English borrowed and changed as a whole, while Romani did not.
Outside of Greece and throughout the rest of Europe, the Romani dialects were influenced seperately. One need but look to the English spoken in the southern parts of the United States, and the English spoken in western England to understand how difficult communication bewteen the two seperate types of English that developed seperately over time.
However, not all hope is lost. The fact that our origins are Indian, and that our grammar and vocabulary share the same paths bewteen India and Europe, provides us with the foundation as a people, while still being distinct.

Slavery, sufering and persecution

Many people (including the Romani), have no idea that the Romani people were enslaved, persecuted by the church, suffered the holocaust, and have to this day laws passed not allowing their existence. The European persecution of the Romani people has had much effect on the fragmentation of the Romani, their language and culture.
Segregation laws over the centuries has kept the Romani outside the literate realm, and only for the past decades have efforts been undertaken by some nations to bring a change to this.

Our purpouse

Based on this, the intentions behind our projects are to distribute information in order to arm all society with knowledge of the Romano people so that all can benefit.

It is not our intention to provide an accurate description of Romani history. We reccomend the Patrin website as a resource for further information on Romani history. What we are doing is supplying a short understanding of our history so that one may understand the motivation behind our projects.