2026 | Position Paper on Safeguarding and Protecting the Romani Language

For more than a thousand years, the Romani language has travelled with our people, from north-western India across Europe and beyond. Despite centuries of slavery, persecution, forced assimilation, language bans and the genocide of the Roma during the Second World War, it has survived through the resilience of Roma families and communities, who have passed it from one generation to the next.

Yet survival is not the same as security. Today, Romani faces growing challenges: fewer children acquire it at home, schools often fail to recognise it as a resource, and it remains under-represented in the digital world. At the same time, new learning resources, machine translation and growing institutional recognition offer opportunities to strengthen its future.

Through this Position Paper, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) brings together leading Romani linguists and educators to examine the language’s current situation, the challenges it faces and the steps needed to protect and promote it. Recognising Romani as central to Roma identity and Europe’s cultural heritage, the paper calls on European institutions, governments, schools, Roma organisations and the technology sector to ensure that Romani is not only preserved, but actively used, taught and developed as a living language.

Developed by the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) within the ERIACNET4EU project, this paper draws on the expertise of ERIAC’s Romani Language thematic section and commissioned contributions from two leading Romani scholars, Ian Hancock and Hristo Kyuchukov.

The Position Paper seeks to promote the recognition, protection, development and revitalisation of the Romani language as an integral part of Roma identity, cultural continuity and collective heritage, and an essential component of Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

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