Romani alphabets

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 1990s Marcel 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". and the Polish publication Informaciaqo lil, 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 as θ and ʒ. 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: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary 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. Descriptive linguistics has, however, a long and established tradition of transcription. Despite small differences between individual linguists in the representation of certain phonemes, most adhere to a system which Hancock terms Pan-Vlax. == Latin script ==

. The overwhelming majority of academic and non-academic literature produced currently in Romani is written using a Latin-based orthography. in different phonological environments; and a double dot (¨) to indicate a centralized vowel. The "meta-notations" are ćh, ʒ, and the caron (ˇ; named after the word for bird), the realisation of which varies by dialect. The first two are respectively pronounced as and in the first stratum but and in the third stratum. The caron on a vowel represents palatalisation; ǒ and ǎ are pronounced and in Lovaricka, but and in Kalderash. This alphabet is used in the educational system in North Macedonia for Romani-speaking students. noted that the following alphabet is used by Romani people in North Macedonia and Serbia (Kosovo): Finnish Romani Finnish Romani (or Finnish Kalo) is written with the following alphabet: The letters in parentheses are only used in loanwords and are therefore not always part of the alphabet. The digraphs dž, kh, ph, th, and tš are used, but are not letters of the alphabet. Š and Ž are only used in these digraphs. == Cyrillic script ==

In Greece, for instance, Romani is mostly written with the Greek alphabet (although very little seems to be written in Romani in Greece). ==Perso-Arabic script==

The Perso-Arabic script has also been used, for example, in Iran. More importantly, the first periodical produced by Roma for Roma was printed in the Arabic script in the 1920s in Edirne in Turkey. It was called Laćo (لاچو), meaning "good". ==Comparison of alphabets==