The Romani, also spelled Romany or Rromani, colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who traditionally lived a nomadic, itinerant lifestyle in Europe. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that the Romani originated in the Indian subcontinent; in particular, the region of present-day Rajasthan. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed to have occurred by historians around 1000 CE. Their original name is from the Sanskrit word डोम (doma) and means a member of a Dalit caste of travelling musicians and dancers. The Doma (Roma) population moved west into the Persian Ghaznavid Empire and later into the Byzantine Empire. The Doma/Roma arrived in Europe around the 13th to 14th century. Although they are dispersed, their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially central, eastern, and southern Europe, as well as western Asia.
Demographic features of the population of the Czech Republic include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, and religious affiliations.
Spiš is a region in north-eastern Slovakia, with a very small area in south-eastern Poland. Spiš is an informal designation of the territory, but it is also the name of one of the 21 official tourism regions of Slovakia. The region is not an administrative division in its own right, but between the late 11th century and 1920 it was an administrative county of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Carpathian Ruthenia is a historical region on the border between Central and Eastern Europe, mostly located in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast, with smaller parts in eastern Slovakia and the Lemko Region in Poland.
Lemkos are an ethnic group inhabiting the Lemko Region of Carpathian Rus', an ethnographic region in the Carpathian Mountains and foothills spanning Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland.
Cieszyn Silesia, Těšín Silesia or Teschen Silesia is a historical region in south-eastern Silesia, centered on the towns of Cieszyn and Český Těšín and bisected by the Olza River. Since 1920 it has been divided between Poland and Czechoslovakia, and later the Czech Republic. It covers an area of about 2,280 square kilometres (880 sq mi) and has about 810,000 inhabitants, of which 1,002 square kilometres (387 sq mi) (44%) is in Poland, while 1,280 square kilometres (494 sq mi) (56%) is in the Czech Republic.
Carpathian Germans are a group of ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe. The term was coined by the historian Raimund Friederich Kaindl (1866–1930), originally generally referring to the German-speaking population of the area around the Carpathian Mountains: the Cisleithanian (Austrian) crown lands of Galicia and Bukovina, as well as the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the northwestern (Maramuresch) region of Romania. Since the First World War, only the Germans of Slovakia and those of Carpathian Ruthenia in Ukraine have commonly been called Carpathian Germans.
Border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia began in 1918 between the Second Polish Republic and First Czechoslovak Republic, both freshly created states. The conflicts centered on the disputed areas of Cieszyn Silesia, Orava Territory and Spiš. After World War II they broadened to include areas around the cities of Kłodzko and Racibórz, which until 1945 had belonged to Germany. The conflicts became critical in 1919 and were finally settled in 1958 in a treaty between the Polish People's Republic and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The Žilina Region is one of the eight Slovak administrative regions and consists of 11 districts (okresy) and 315 municipalities, from which 18 have a town status. The region was established in 1923, however, in its present borders exists from 1996. It is a more industrial region with several large towns. Žilina is the region administrative center and there is a strong cultural environment in Martin.
The Cieszyn Silesian dialect or Teschen Silesian dialect is one of the Silesian dialects. It has its roots mainly in Old Polish and also has strong influences from Czech and German and, to a lesser extent, from Vlach and Slovak. It is spoken in Cieszyn Silesia, a region on both sides of the Polish-Czech border. It remains mostly a spoken language. The dialect is better preserved today than traditional dialects of many other West Slavic regions.
The Gorals, also known as the Highlanders are an indigenous ethnographic sub-group primarily found in their traditional area of southern Poland, northern Slovakia and in the region of Cieszyn Silesia in the Czech Republic, where they are known as the Silesian Gorals. There is also a significant Goral diaspora in the area of Bukovina in western Ukraine and in northern Romania, as well as in Chicago, the seat of the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America.
Bohemian Romani or Bohemian Romany was a dialect of Romani formerly spoken by the Romani people of Bohemia, the western part of today's Czech Republic. It became extinct after World War II, due to the genocide of most of its speakers in extermination camps by Nazi Germany.
The Romani people have several distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Calé, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans in the early 12th century, from a migration out of the Indian subcontinent beginning about 1st century – 2nd century AD. They settled in the areas of present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Roma population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.
Slavic microlanguages are literary linguistic varieties that exist alongside the better-known Slavic languages of historically prominent nations. The term "literary microlanguages" was coined by Aleksandr Dulichenko in late 1970s; it subsequently became a standard term in Slavistics.
Following centuries of relative ethnic diversity, the population of modern Poland has become nearly completely ethnically homogeneous Polish as a result of the altered borders as well as both the Nazi German and Soviet Russian or Polish Communist campaigns of genocide, expulsion and deportation during and after World War II in the country. Nevertheless, various ethnic minorities of various origin remain in Poland today, including some newly arrived or grown in size in recent decades.
Polska Roma are the largest and one of the oldest ethnolinguistic subgroups of Romani people living in Poland. Some Polska Roma also live in North America, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain and countries of the European Union. The term "Polska Roma" is both an ethnonym of the group and a term used in the academic literature. As such it is distinct from the terms "Polish Roma" or "Roma in Poland" which better denote the broader Roma population in Poland. Polish ethnographer Jerzy Ficowski, writing in the 1950s and 1960s used the term "Polish Lowlander Gypsies" to refer to the same group, though this terminology is no longer in widespread use.
The Languages of Poland include Polish – the language of the indigenous population – and those of immigrants and their descendants. Polish is the only official language recognized by the country's constitution and the majority of the country's population speak it as a native language or use it for home communication. Deaf communities in Poland use Polish Sign Language, which belongs to the German family of Sign Languages.
Carpathian Romani, also known as Central Romani or Romungro Romani, is a group of dialects of the Romani language spoken from southern Poland to Hungary, and from eastern Austria to Ukraine.
Hungarian has ten dialects. These are fully mutually intelligible, and do not differ significantly from standard Hungarian except for the Csángó dialect. They are mostly distinguished by pronunciation; although there are differences in vocabulary, these are usually small and do not hinder intelligibility. Due to increased internal migration and urbanization during the 20th century, most of the characteristics of the different dialects can only be observed in smaller towns and villages, and even there mostly among the elderly; the population of the larger cities and especially the capital has been mixed for generations and the dialectal differences have been lost. A notable exception is the Western Transdanubian pronunciation, which is distinctly noticeable even in Szombathely, the largest city in the region.
The Romani people, also known as the Roma, qualify as an ethnic minority group in Poland of Indo-Aryan origins. The Council of Europe regards the endonym "Roma" more appropriate when referencing the people, and "Romani" when referencing cultural characteristics. The term Cyganie is considered an exonym in Poland.
