romany traveller words

Six English words borrowed from the Romany language

Lecturer in Language and linguistics, Nottingham Trent University

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Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities have been part of the UK’s regional populations for centuries. Roma communities are documented to have migrated to the UK during the early 15th century and evidence is found among a variety of official legal documentation and formal correspondence. As part of a wider community referred to as Gypsy Roma and Traveller, Roma have often faced hostility and inequality. It may be surprising then to hear that Romany, an unwritten language spoken by Roma communities is used in everyday English. Romany is a language spoken by communities who live largely across Europe.

The Romany language and culture have been associated with central and northern India and inherits a significant part of its linguistic heritage from Sanskrit alongside modern Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. In this sense, it is considered the only Indo Aryan-derived European language.

While there are large communities of Romany speakers across Europe and beyond, only a small number of people in the UK speak a fully grammatical version. Within the UK, the majority of speakers use what is referred to as Anglo-Romany. This is a language unique to the Anglo-Roma of the UK and with a historical and linguistic connection to Romany culture. You may be surprised by some of the words that have been incorrectly labelled as colloquial or slang in English, which are in fact words that have crossed over from Anglo-Romany.

Here are six such words including their meaning found in regional dialects in England with their Romany historical links explained.

This is a word considered slang according to many online dictionaries. However, this is actually an Anglo-Romany word used for “money”. The word derives from the European Romany word “ vangar ” and is a word used for “coal”, having a clear and historical association of value. There are a number of variations used across Anglo-Romany speaking communities for money and these range from “ vonga ” to “ luvna ”.

The word “chav” has been popularised as a slur in English to mean a person whose behaviour shows a lack of education or someone having a lower-class status . But the meaning of “chav” or “chavvi” in Anglo-Romany simply means “boy” or “girl” or even just “child”. “chavo” for boy, “chavi” for girl and “chave” meaning children.

This is another word that was brought into mainstream use and is often associated with the comedy character Del Boy in the popular British sitcom Only Fools and Horses. The word “cushty”, sometimes spelled “kushti” in Anglo-Romany is used as an affirmative adjective and means “good” or “fantastic”. The meaning of cushty originates from an older Romany word “ kuč ”, meaning expensive. Its use in English is most likely linked to dialect mixing of Anglo-Roma communities and east London cockney speakers.

4. Chingering

According to the online source the urban dictionary the word “ chingering ” means to caress another person’s chin in a sensual way. This is quite far removed from the meaning of the word chingering used amongst speakers of Anglo-Romany. This word is used to refer to quarrelling or to the act of insulting someone. The word again derives from the Romany words “ čhinger ” and “ čhingerel ” meaning to quarrel or shout.

This is perhaps the most well-used example of a Romany word found in everyday English, most typically meaning “friend” in English. This term actually originates from the Romany word “phral” meaning brother. The Anglo-Romany word pal is also used for brother and has been extended and again crossed over through dialect contact over the centuries into everyday English.

The English slang word “peeved” is sometimes used to refer to someone who has drunk too much alcohol and is again derived from a Romany word. The European Romany word “ pijav ” means “drink” and shows a direct connection with the English slang.

These are only a few examples and words such as “lollipop”, and “doylum” are also words from Anglo-Romany. There are many other words from Anglo-Romany that have been adopted into English, and most likely a regional dialect you know will have some fascinating examples.

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Six English words borrowed from the Romani language

The romani dialect and culture have been associated with central and northern india and they inherit a significant part of their linguistic heritage from sanskrit, writes peter lee, article bookmarked.

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G ypsy, Roma and Traveller communities have been part of the UK’s regional populations for centuries. Roma communities are documented to have migrated to the UK during the early 15th century and evidence is found among a variety of official legal documentation and formal correspondence. As part of a wider community referred to as Gypsy Roma and Traveller, Roma have often faced hostility and inequality. It may be surprising then to hear that Romani, an unwritten language spoken by Roma communities is used in everyday English. Romani is a language spoken by communities who live largely across Europe.

The Romani language and culture have been associated with central and northern India and inherit a significant part of their linguistic heritage from Sanskrit alongside modern Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. In this sense, it is considered the only Indo Aryan-derived European language.

• ‘Tickna mora o’beng’: Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight explains meaning of Ruby’s Romani premonition

While there are large communities of Romani speakers across Europe and beyond, only a small number of people in the UK speak a fully grammatical version. Within the UK, the majority of speakers use what is referred to as Anglo-Romani. This is a language unique to the Anglo-Roma of the UK and with a historical and linguistic connection to Romani culture. You may be surprised by some of the words that have been incorrectly labelled as colloquial or slang in English, which are in fact words that have crossed over from Anglo-Romani.

Here are six such words including their meaning found in regional dialects in England with their Romani historical links explained.

This is a word considered slang according to many online dictionaries. However, this is actually an Anglo-Romani word used for “money”. The word derives from the European Romani word “ vangar ” and is a word used for “coal”, having a clear and historical association of value. There are a number of variations used across Anglo-Romani speaking communities for money and these range from “ vonga ” to “ luvna ”.

The word “chav” has been popularised as a slur in English to mean a person whose behaviour shows a lack of education or someone having a lower-class status . But the meaning of “chav” or “chavvi” in Anglo-Romani simply means “boy” or “girl” or even just “child”. “chavo” for boy, “chavi” for girl and “chave” meaning children.

This is another word that was brought into mainstream use and is often associated with the comedy character Del Boy in the popular British sitcom Only Fools and Horses . The word “cushty”, sometimes spelled “kushti” in Anglo-Romani is used as an affirmative adjective and means “good” or “fantastic”. The meaning of cushty originates from an older Romani word “ kuč ”, meaning expensive. Its use in English is most likely linked to dialect mixing of Anglo-Roma communities and east London cockney speakers.

4. Chingering

According to the online source the urban dictionary, the word “ chingering ” means to caress another person’s chin in a sensual way. This is quite far removed from the meaning of the word chingering used amongst speakers of Anglo-Romani. This word is used to refer to quarrelling or to the act of insulting someone. The word again derives from the Romani words “ čhinger ” and “ čhingerel ” meaning to quarrel or shout.

This is perhaps the most well-used example of a Romani word found in everyday English, most typically meaning “friend” in English. This term actually originates from the Romani word “phral” meaning brother. The Anglo-Romani word pal is also used for brother and has been extended and again crossed over through dialect contact over the centuries into everyday English.

The English slang word “peeved” is sometimes used to refer to someone who has drunk too much alcohol and is again derived from a Romani word. The European Romani word “ pijav ” means “drink” and shows a direct connection with the English slang.

These are only a few examples and words such as “lollipop”, and “doylum” are also words from Anglo-Romani. There are many other words from Anglo-Romani that have been adopted into English, and most likely a regional dialect you know will have some fascinating examples.

Peter Lee is a lecturer in language and linguistics at Nottingham Trent University. This article first appeared on The Conversation .

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Useful phrases in Romani

A collection of useful phrases in Romani, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in many parts of Europe.

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See these phrases in any combination of two languages in the Phrase Finder . If you can provide recordings, corrections or additional translations, please contact me .

Key to abbreviations: frm = formal, inf = informal, sg = singular (said to one person), pl = plural (said to more than one person), >m = said to males, >f = said to females.

Corrections and additions by Piroska Raczgypsy and Filip Hromčík

Hear some Romani phrases

If you would like to make any corrections or additions to this page, or if you can provide recordings, please contact me .

Information about Romani | Phrases | Tower of Babel

Other collections of Romani phrases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyojvlmbzPM https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070311091110AAxqzcX

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Words that you use everyday that came from the Romany Gypsy language

These Romany words and terms have made their way into the fabric of the English language

• 05:00, 1 JAN 2024

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From cushty to cosh, and gavver to gibberish, here are some common words in the English language that you probably didn’t know originated from Romany Gypsies. The Romany - sometimes spelt Romani - language is an unwritten language thought to have originated in northern India, particularly from the Hindi, Sanskrit and Punjabi languages.

There are very few people in the UK that speak it, and only 5 to 6 million in Europe and the USA. The largest concentrations of Roma people now live in Turkey, Spain and Romania, and in England they are commonly referred to as Gypsies. According to the 2011 census, 635 Gypsy, traveller and Irish traveller people were living in Cornwall.

However this is recognised by the Government as an under count as many are scared to disclose their ethnicity. Therefore it is suggested the figure is more likely around 3,000.

Read more: Behind the Cornish language revival and the people who speak Kernewek

Read more: More and more people in Cornwall learning Cornish as list of 20 key words and phrases released

Over the decades, common phrases and words used by travelling families in Britain have slowly cemented themselves into the workings of the English language and are often treated as slang or colloquialisms – but that’s not the case at all.

Here are some of the most commonly-used words and phrases derived from Gypsy language and their meanings.

What we know as that delightful counter where you are served drinks, or the things that prevent you from leaving your prison cell, the word bar originally comes from the word ‘stone’ in Romany. But, it actually means a pound coin or a pound note when used.

An extremely popular term in the English language, the word chav is used to describe a lower-class youth - perhaps dressed in sportswear.

But the term actually comes from the Romany word ‘ chavi’, meaning child.

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Cosh, a word used in English to describe a type of weapon (a heavy stick or a bar), actually derived from the Romany word ‘cosht’ which means ‘stick’.

One of many catchphrases popularised by Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter in Only Fools and Horses, the term cushty actually comes from Romany word ‘kushitipen’ or ‘kushti’ and literally means ‘very good’.

More Traveller and Gypsy stories from Cornwall

Dick was a word commonly used to refer to a detective or private investigator in the 19th century. ‘To dick’ would literally mean ‘to watch’ and comes from the Romany word ‘dik,’ which means to look and to see.

This common word used to insult people or point out a lack of intelligence comes from the Romany term ‘divvy’ which means mad.

Another word used to describe policeman or policewoman that comes from the Romany Gypsy word ‘garav’ which means hide.

We use the word gibberish to describe someone talking nonsense, but it is believed to have derived from the Romani word ‘jib’, meaning tongue as well as language.

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The name for this sweet tooth favourite among Brits actually comes from Romany ‘loli phabai’ which means red apple. It was first a Roma tradition to sell candied apples on a stick.

Most often heard nowadays to describe someone as steaming drunk, the term Mullered actually comes from the Romany word ‘muller’ which means dead or killed.

The term used to describe a police informer comes from the Romany word ‘nāk’ which means nose.

Probably the best known English expression to come from the Romany language is pal. The term used to describe friends comes from Romany word ‘phral’ which means brother.

Commonly used in the North of England to describe food, the word scran is believed to have derived from the Romany word ‘satan’ which means to eat.

What we know as a container that can be found on building sites actually comes from Romany word ‘skip’, meaning basket.

Used to refer to clothing – more commonly swimming gear – togs is a Romany word meaning clothes.

The word wonga – most famously used by the former payday loan provider of the same name – actually comes from the Romany word ‘vonga’ meaning coal as well as money.

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Article was first published in 2022

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Gypsy Roma and Traveller History and Culture

Gypsy Roma and Traveller people belong to minority ethnic groups that have contributed to British society for centuries. Their distinctive way of life and traditions manifest themselves in nomadism, the centrality of their extended family, unique languages and entrepreneurial economy. It is reported that there are around 300,000 Travellers in the UK and they are one of the most disadvantaged groups. The real population may be different as some members of these communities do not participate in the census .

The Traveller Movement works predominantly with ethnic Gypsy, Roma, and Irish Traveller Communities.

Irish Travellers and Romany Gypsies

Irish Travellers

Traditionally, Irish Travellers are a nomadic group of people from Ireland but have a separate identity, heritage and culture to the community in general. An Irish Traveller presence can be traced back to 12th century Ireland, with migrations to Great Britain in the early 19th century. The Irish Traveller community is categorised as an ethnic minority group under the Race Relations Act, 1976 (amended 2000); the Human Rights Act 1998; and the Equality Act 2010. Some Travellers of Irish heritage identify as Pavee or Minceir, which are words from the Irish Traveller language, Shelta.

Romany Gypsies

Romany Gypsies have been in Britain since at least 1515 after migrating from continental Europe during the Roma migration from India. The term Gypsy comes from “Egyptian” which is what the settled population perceived them to be because of their dark complexion. In reality, linguistic analysis of the Romani language proves that Romany Gypsies, like the European Roma, originally came from Northern India, probably around the 12th century. French Manush Gypsies have a similar origin and culture to Romany Gypsies.

There are other groups of Travellers who may travel through Britain, such as Scottish Travellers, Welsh Travellers and English Travellers, many of whom can trace a nomadic heritage back for many generations and who may have married into or outside of more traditional Irish Traveller and Romany Gypsy families. There were already indigenous nomadic people in Britain when the Romany Gypsies first arrived hundreds of years ago and the different cultures/ethnicities have to some extent merged.

Number of Gypsies and Travellers in Britain

This year, the 2021 Census included a “Roma” category for the first time, following in the footsteps of the 2011 Census which included a “Gypsy and Irish Traveller” category. The 2021 Census statistics have not yet been released but the 2011 Census put the combined Gypsy and Irish Traveller population in England and Wales as 57,680. This was recognised by many as an underestimate for various reasons. For instance, it varies greatly with data collected locally such as from the Gypsy Traveller Accommodation Needs Assessments, which total the Traveller population at just over 120,000, according to our research.

Other academic estimates of the combined Gypsy, Irish Traveller and other Traveller population range from 120,000 to 300,000. Ethnic monitoring data of the Gypsy Traveller population is rarely collected by key service providers in health, employment, planning and criminal justice.

Where Gypsies and Travellers Live

Although most Gypsies and Travellers see travelling as part of their identity, they can choose to live in different ways including:

• moving regularly around the country from site to site and being ‘on the road’
• living permanently in caravans or mobile homes, on sites provided by the council, or on private sites
• living in settled accommodation during winter or school term-time, travelling during the summer months
• living in ‘bricks and mortar’ housing, settled together, but still retaining a strong commitment to Gypsy/Traveller culture and traditions

Currently, their nomadic life is being threatened by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, that is currently being deliberated in Parliament, To find out more or get involved with opposing this bill, please visit here

Although Travellers speak English in most situations, they often speak to each other in their own language; for Irish Travellers this is called Cant or Gammon* and Gypsies speak Romani, which is the only indigenous language in the UK with Indic roots.

*Sometimes referred to as “Shelta” by linguists and academics

New Travellers and Show People

There are also Traveller groups which are known as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘ethnic’ Travellers. These include ‘new’ Travellers and Showmen. Most of the information on this page relates to ethnic Travellers but ‘Showmen’ do share many cultural traits with ethnic Travellers.

Show People are a cultural minority that have owned and operated funfairs and circuses for many generations and their identity is connected to their family businesses. They operate rides and attractions that can be seen throughout the summer months at funfairs. They generally have winter quarters where the family settles to repair the machinery that they operate and prepare for the next travelling season. Most Show People belong to the Showmen’s Guild which is an organisation that provides economic and social regulation and advocacy for Show People. The Showman’s Guild works with both central and local governments to protect the economic interests of its members.

The term New Travellers refers to people sometimes referred to as “New Age Travellers”. They are generally people who have taken to life ‘on the road’ in their own lifetime, though some New Traveller families claim to have been on the road for three consecutive generations. The New Traveller culture grew out of the hippie and free-festival movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Barge Travellers are similar to New Travellers but live on the UK’s 2,200 miles of canals. They form a distinct group in the canal network and many are former ‘new’ Travellers who moved onto the canals after changes to the law made the free festival circuit and a life on the road almost untenable. Many New Travellers have also settled into private sites or rural communes although a few groups are still travelling.

If you are a new age Traveller and require support please contact Friends, Families, and Travellers (FFT) .

Differences and Values

Differences Between Gypsies, Travellers, and Roma

Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are often categorised together under the “Roma” definition in Europe and under the acronym “GRT” in Britain. These communities and other nomadic groups, such as Scottish and English Travellers, Show People and New Travellers, share a number of characteristics in common: the importance of family and/or community networks; the nomadic way of life, a tendency toward self-employment, experience of disadvantage and having the poorest health outcomes in the United Kingdom.

The Roma communities also originated from India from around the 10th/ 12th centuries and have historically faced persecution, including slavery and genocide. They are still marginalised and ghettoised in many Eastern European countries (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania etc) where they are often the largest and most visible ethnic minority group, sometimes making up 10% of the total population. However, ‘Roma’ is a political term and a self-identification of many Roma activists. In reality, European Roma populations are made up of various subgroups, some with their own form of Romani, who often identify as that group rather than by the all-encompassing Roma identity.

Travellers and Roma each have very different customs, religion, language and heritage. For instance, Gypsies are said to have originated in India and the Romani language (also spoken by Roma) is considered to consist of at least seven varieties, each a language in their own right.

Values and Culture of GRT Communities

Family, extended family bonds and networks are very important to the Gypsy and Traveller way of life, as is a distinct identity from the settled ‘Gorja’ or ‘country’ population. Family anniversaries, births, weddings and funerals are usually marked by extended family or community gatherings with strong religious ceremonial content. Gypsies and Travellers generally marry young and respect their older generation. Contrary to frequent media depiction, Traveller communities value cleanliness and tidiness.

Many Irish Travellers are practising Catholics, while some Gypsies and Travellers are part of a growing Christian Evangelical movement.

Gypsy and Traveller culture has always adapted to survive and continues to do so today. Rapid economic change, recession and the gradual dismantling of the ‘grey’ economy have driven many Gypsy and Traveller families into hard times. The criminalisation of ‘travelling’ and the dire shortage of authorised private or council sites have added to this. Some Travellers describe the effect that this is having as “a crisis in the community” . A study in Ireland put the suicide rate of Irish Traveller men as 3-5 times higher than the wider population. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the same phenomenon is happening amongst Traveller communities in the UK.

Gypsies and Travellers are also adapting to new ways, as they have always done. Most of the younger generation and some of the older generation use social network platforms to stay in touch and there is a growing recognition that reading and writing are useful tools to have. Many Gypsies and Travellers utilise their often remarkable array of skills and trades as part of the formal economy. Some Gypsies and Travellers, many supported by their families, are entering further and higher education and becoming solicitors, teachers, accountants, journalists and other professionals.

There have always been successful Gypsy and Traveller businesses, some of which are household names within their sectors, although the ethnicity of the owners is often concealed. Gypsies and Travellers have always been represented in the fields of sport and entertainment.

How Gypsies and Travellers Are Disadvantaged

The Traveller, Gypsy, and Roma communities are widely considered to be among the most socially excluded communities in the UK. They have a much lower life expectancy than the general population, with Traveller men and women living 10-12 years less than the wider population.

Travellers have higher rates of infant mortality, maternal death and stillbirths than the general population. They experience racist sentiment in the media and elsewhere, which would be socially unacceptable if directed at any other minority community. Ofsted consider young Travellers to be one of the groups most at risk of low attainment in education.

Government services rarely include Traveller views in the planning and delivery of services.

In recent years, there has been increased political networking between the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller activists and campaign organisations.

Watch this video by Travellers Times made for Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month 2021:

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16 words you use everyday that actually come from the Romany Gypsy language

Words like 'lollipop', 'bar', 'chav' and 'wonga' are among them

• 08:00, 26 JUL 2020

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You may not realise it, but a number of pretty common words in the English language have actually originated from Romany Gypsies.

The Romany language, also known as Romani, is an unwritten language believed to have originated in Northern India, Cornwall Live reports , particularly from the Hindi, Sanskrit and Punjabi languages.

Very few people in the UK can speak the language, with only between 5 to 6 million in Europe and USA able to do so.

Nowadays, Roma people reside in Turkey, Spain and Romania, while in England they are commonly referred to as Gypsies.

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Many are scared to fully disclose their ethnicity, so a definitive number of Romany Gypsies in the UK is unknown, but it's expected to be in the thousands.

So it's no wonder that over the years common words and phrases used by travelling families in Britain have become a part of the English language, though some are often mistaken as slang or colloquialisms.

Here are some of the most commonly used words and phrases which have derived from Gypsy language, as well as the meanings behind them...

What we know as that delightful counter where you are served drinks, or the things that prevent you from leaving your prison cell, the word bar originally comes from the word ‘stone’ in Romany. But, it actually means a pound coin or a pound note when used.

An extremely popular term in the English language, the word chav is used to describe a lower-class youth - perhaps dressed in sportswear.

But the term actually comes from the Romany word ‘ chavi’,   meaning child.

Cosh, a word used in English to describe a type of weapon (a heavy stick or a bar), actually derived from the Romany word ‘cosht’ which means ‘stick’.

One of many catchphrases popularised by Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter in Only Fools and Horses, the term cushty actually comes from Romany word ‘kushitipen’ or ‘kushti’ and literally means ‘very good’.

Dick was a word commonly used to refer to a detective or private investigator in the 19th century. ‘To dick’ would literally mean ‘to watch’ and comes from the Romany word ‘dik,’ which means to look and to see.

This common word used to insult people or point out a lack of intelligence comes from the Romany term ‘divvy’ which means mad.

Another word used to describe policeman or policewoman that comes from the Romany Gypsy word ‘garav’ which means hide.

8. Gibberish

We use the word gibberish to describe someone talking nonsense, but it is believed to have derived from the Romani word ‘jib’, meaning tongue as well as language.

9. Lollipop

The name for this sweet tooth favourite among Brits actually comes from Romany ‘loli phabai’ which means red apple. It was first a Roma tradition to sell candied apples on a stick.

10. Mullered

Most often heard nowadays to describe someone as steaming drunk, the term Mullered actually comes from the Romany word ‘muller’ which means dead or killed.

The term used to describe a police informer comes from the Romany word  ‘nāk’ which means nose.

Probably the best known English expression to come from the Romany language is pal. The term used to describe friends comes from Romany word ‘phral’ which means brother.

Commonly used in the North of England to describe food, the word scran is believed to have derived from the Romany word ‘satan’ which means to eat.

What we know as a container that can be found on building sites actually comes from Romany word ‘skip’, meaning basket.

Used to refer to clothing – more commonly swimming gear – togs is a Romany word meaning clothes.

The word wonga – most famously used by the former payday loan provider of the same name – actually comes from the Romany word ‘vonga’ meaning coal as well as money.

• In the News
• Most Recent

‘I don’t look like most people’s idea of a Gypsy’

I t is Friday night. I’m 30 years old, alone on a fake-fur blanket in the back of a cold Transit van. Most of my generation are out there in pubs, or indoors by the telly, canoodling, arguing or cooking, or going across to the thermostat to turn the heating up. I’m parked on a Cornish industrial estate with no warmth except the tiny, wavering plume of heat that rises out of my lantern. This place is so lonesome that even the doggers, boy-racers and stoners have spurned it. I curse myself silently. You’re not a Traveller, my mate, you’re a div. What sort of Traveller would come and sleep here on their own? I have covered thousands of miles in my van in a bid to uncover the history of Gypsy Britain. But the road is proving tough.

Gypsy reality is partly composed of fairgrounds and showgrounds, picturesque lakeside halts, sheltered commons, bright heaths. But it also comprised frozen copses and hilltops. Old maintenance roads with potholes and bad light. Scrapyards. Council waste ground. Lay-bys near the edges of tips. Slag-heaps and drained marshes. Fen ends. Chalk pits, yards and quarries. These are the stopping places, these fringes and in-between places. They are the places that nobody lives except Travellers – or nobody but those who share ancient connections with them: gamekeepers and poachers, scrap-metal men, horsewomen, rangers and shepherds. They are the old nomads’ haunts of the island. Many are smashed and built over; some – magically – are still more or less just as they were in centuries long past. They form the hidden Gypsy and Traveller map of the country we live in: they are the bedrock of our reality and, perhaps, the antidote to the unending cycles of romanticisation and demonisation.

I had conceived a plan to visit these places, to live in them in my own way, and see what I might learn. Perhaps I might even solve the bizarre contradiction of Britain’s love affair with caravanning, camping and glamping, and its hatred of those who were born to this life, and who largely inspired its adoption as a non-Gypsy pastime. As one Scottish Gypsy Traveller put it: “There are 80,000 members of the Caravan Club, but I’m not allowed to travel?”

There is more to this Gypsy geography than a list of physical places. The stopping places themselves are an outgrowth of something non-physical, something that is ancient, unseen yet important, precious and reviled, envied and feared. This thing is the Gypsy belief – the core belief of the culture – that it is possible to live in a different way: in your own way, part of the world, but not imprisoned by the rules. That you can know the ropes and yet not be hemmed in by them. That you can dwell alongside the mainstream, while not being part of it. Otter-like, you can live in the bank of the river and swim and hunt there when you need to, and then climb back out with equal ease and alacrity. There is no better symbol of this belief than the network of atchin tans (stopping places) laced across Britain; they are historical, topographical proof that the Gypsy philosophy has existed here, that it still does, that it still can. By staying at the traditional stopping places, I hoped to answer the questions that had been following me, on and off, all my life. What is left of these places? What might we learn from them? What redemption might lie there, in a country that still passes new legislation aimed at ending the Traveller way of life? Is it still possible to live on the road? Was the end of the old Gypsy life a tragedy, or was it a case of good riddance to an irredeemably hard and pitiless life on the edge? Above all, I hoped to resolve the biggest question: the question of myself, whether I could make my peace with Gypsy culture. My conflict seemed to echo the wider tension between nomads and settled people that endures in modern Britain.

O n the way to our regular pitch selling flowers in the marketplace in Petersfield, my elders would point and nod at empty spaces by the sides of the road, flat areas on verges and slightly raised banks, vacant pull-ins and lay-bys, and make comments as if there was something there, something I couldn’t see. They were glimmers of another world, but it felt as distant as the stars. I knew the places had something to do with the time they were “on the road” – most of my family were settled now, living in houses or caravans and mobile homes on private bits of land.

Travellers I knew from the east of England had lived rough deep into the recent past, still working the farms into the 1990s. By then, it had been the best part of 50 years since anyone in my family had depended on that kind of work. So it came as a shock to meet Travellers younger than me who had grown up picking turnips in January. They described reaching down with a gloved hand and grabbing hold of the big, leafy tops, how it would sometimes send a plug of ice shooting upwards.

Alongside selling flowers, my family had roofing and car-breaking businesses. We had a big field and a yard, a word that seemed to mean a place where all things might, and did, happen. Terriers, geese and perturbed-looking cockerels roamed in between the legs of cantankerous horses. Stables were stacked full of the musty paraphernalia of horsemanship, flower-selling, roofing and car respraying. Bits of cars lay everywhere, named as if they were the parts or clothes of people or animals: bonnets, boots, seats, wings, belts. There were brass-handled horsewhips, jangling harnesses, buckets of molasses-sprayed chaff and milled sugar-beet, bales of sweet-smelling fresh hay. But all of this old rustic stuff was stacked and wedged in among the hard and greasy gear of the family economy: gas bottles, blowtorches, leaky old engines, spray paint, rolls of lead, felt, and seemingly infinite stacks of every conceivable type of roof tile. A heavy boxing bag swung with barely perceptible creaks, keeping time in the half-light of the dusty old garage.

There were caravans there that we sometimes lived in and out of, especially in the summer. We never considered this odd, even though we also had a big house on the land that my grandad had built with his men. And there always seemed to be heavy and dangerous things lying close to hand. The hard stuff of motion was everywhere, although we were settled: cars, tractors and trucks, some brand-new, others eaten by weather and time; horses, ponies, traps, sulkies and carts; scattered wheels and bolts from Ford and Bedford lorries. And, hung from a barn door like a pair of swords and scabbing to ochre with rust, there were two axles rescued from the ashes of the last wagon owned by our family.

We had a name for ourselves: Travellers. In our case, it didn’t just mean anyone who travelled around, regardless of their race: to us it meant our people specifically, the Romanies of Britain. The first Romanies probably arrived on the British mainland towards the end of the 15th century, and had been a contentious presence ever since.

W herever the Gypsies went, they took with them their strange tongue, Romani, and it was through this that the mystery of their origins was solved. An 18th-century German linguist called Johann Rüdiger overheard Gypsies talking, and was struck by the similarity of their speech to Indian languages. Later linguists, including the so-called “Romany Ryes” – rye being the Romani word for a gentleman – such as the English writer George Borrow and the Irish academic John Sampson, would identify layers of borrowings from Persian, Slavic and Romance languages in the Gypsies’ speech, using these to trace a philological map of their long road into the West. English Romani had German-derived words in it, like nixis , meaning “nothing”, and fogel for “smell”.

As for the name of the Romanies, it was derived from their own word for “man” or “husband”, rom , and it had nothing to do with Romania, which got its name from the Roman military camps which once filled its territory. The Gypsies called their language Romanes , an adverb meaning “like a rom ”. To rokker Romanes meant, simply, to talk like a Gypsy and not like a gorjer – a non-Gypsy. The word gorjies comes from the old Romany word gadje or gadzhe , and though its form has mutated with time, its meaning is the same: the non-Gypsies, outsiders, the people-who-aren’t-us.

Almost everyone who has studied Romani in Britain has remarked on how adept its speakers are at coming up with names for things. In some ways, talking Romanes means having to be constantly inventive and alert, both in terms of creating words and also interpreting the new ones that get spun off the cuff and thrown into daily Traveller conversation. There is no stigma attached to inventing words, as there so often is in English; nor are new words looked down upon as annoying neologisms that we’d be better off without. Invented words are more likely to be smiled upon or chuckled at as evidence of a witty, intelligent mind; one with a good and flexible grasp of the ancient Travellers’ tongue.

Besides, if Romani is to retain one of the functions which has kept it alive thus far – and which it has in common with almost all minority languages – namely, to stop outsiders knowing what you are talking about, then it will always be necessary to invent new ways of saying things. According to a Belarusian Romany man I once met, a word is no longer a truly Romani word once its meaning becomes known amongst the gadzhe – it is useless, dead, and best left where it is. This is an extreme opinion, but it points to a common anxiety: that the language will lose its power if it becomes too widely known. Yet words come and go as they please, like mood and temper; traded by friends, explained by lovers, and hurled across the fray. Every Gypsy who “gives away” the Romani language risks the accusation of treason.

I n the old Romany tradition, you can only call yourself a true Romany Gypsy – one of the kaulo ratti , the black blood – if all your ancestors, as far as you know, are of the tribe. I can trace my Romany ancestry back at least six generations; I was brought up to know the Romani language; to learn the old tales and to keep the Romanipen – the cleanliness taboos of the old-fashioned Gypsies. I was raised, and still live, in a Romany psychological realm; a mental Gypsyland.

I have both Gypsy and non-Gypsy blood and so, in many Travellers’ eyes, I do not have the right to call myself a true-bred Romany. It does not matter that there is no such thing as a racially pure Gypsy: over a 1,000-year migration it is virtually impossible that there will have been no mingling in the line. The mixing in my family had happened within living memory, and this meant I was at best a poshrat – a mixed-blood Gypsy – and at worst a “half- chat gorjie ” or, as a friend once memorably put it, a “fucked-up half-breed”.

I do not look like most people’s idea of a typical Gypsy, my blue eyes and fair hair belying my origins, my picture of myself. My identity was inside me and the outside didn’t match up. It imbued me with a tetchy defensiveness, and a resentment of people whom I then believed had simpler ethnicities: Scottish, Nigerian, Han.

I felt so close to my roots, and especially to the Romany women who had brought me up – my mum; her mother, Gran; and Gran’s mother, Nan. But this seemed to count for little in a world which, for all its modernity, still believed in labels such as “half-caste”, “full-blood” and “mixed race”. Later, as a teenager, I started carrying photographs of darker-haired family members in my wallet, to challenge the disbelief of those who thought I was lying about my Romany background. I lived in a world that wasn’t sure if I really belonged in it, and so I wasn’t sure, either. Regardless, it was where I was. Our family were the mistrusted local Gypsies, the bane of the decent, upstanding parish council. We were “gyppos”, “pikeys”, “ diddakois ”, “them lot”. Locally, we were infamous. The divide was crystal clear.

Compared with the insults and slurs, the words Romanies, Gypsies, and Travellers were dignified, and we used all of them interchangeably. The greater part of our family owned their own yards and bungalows, but the name Travellers still seemed to make sense. There were wheels everywhere, and we were always on hair-trigger alert to hook up trailers and go when the need arose: we drove miles for a living, and had family who lived on the road. Some places with links to the Travellers were not easily romanticised. The sides of the M1, the A1, the A303 and the M25 are peppered with modern-day atchin tans . They are sites with access to opportunities to earn money, and – being less desirable to non-Gypsies – also the sorts of locales where less cash is needed to set up a camp.

Such places symbolise the misunderstood truth of many Traveller lives, which is that they are neither permanently nomadic, nor ever truly static. Howbeit, these yards provide a base, the highway is right beside them, ready for the times when family ties, work, a wedding, a funeral, the fair season, beckon. Councils refer to them as “sites close to the key regional transport corridors, favoured by Gypsies and Travellers”. Travellers call them :“Handy, being right by that main road”. Handy, yes, but still handcuffed to tragedy. Every family is haunted by stories of relatives, too often toddlers, who have been knocked down and killed by their literal closeness to roads.

The word “Gypsy” wasn’t often heard back when I was a teenager. When it was, it was usually as part of a story about the old days, where someone had shouted out, “Dirty Gypsies!” and nine times out of 10 a fight had ensued, which the dirty Gypsies – who, in my grandad’s words, were “rough, tough and made out of the right stuff” – almost always won.

In our world, arguments are often resolved by somebody leaving and the relationship being severed. If this doesn’t happen, then there will almost always be a fight. In the best-case scenario, it’ll just be a fair fist fight, nice and clean, one-on-one, with a referee to see fair play and as few spectators as possible to get sucked into the row. It can be between two men or two women: it’s usually men, but not always. These things are often organised quickly in a place right out of the way, so the law is unlikely to be an issue; plus, some police officers I’ve spoken to even seem to have a laissez-faire stance on it, possibly because they have seen worse ways of ending a row than a bare-knuckle fight. Worst-case scenario, it will not be clean and it will not be fair, and the more people that get involved, the more likely that is. If weapons come into it, then the police are especially likely to show an interest.

The proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674-1913 are speckled with references to London’s Gypsies and Travellers. There is a website that explains why they were “over-represented in the proceedings”: they formed part of “what many contemporaries considered a dangerous and crime-prone “residuum”’, which seeped back into the city at autumn following the end of the temporary farm work. It goes on, telling how “in a working-class mirror to the elite’s “London Season”, October and November saw hundreds and thousands of men, women and children returning to the capital from hop-picking and market gardening, from touring the fairs and tramping in search of work”. It was a yearly migration from the city to the countryside and back that continued, for some, right up to the 1950s.

For all its flighty connotations, Gypsy culture can be stifling in its demands for living in line with its hidden rules. Rock stars employ “Gypsy” to mean those who have escaped from moral claustrophobia, but in reality, Gypsies are just as likely to feel confined as anybody else. In Glasgow, I watched as a troupe of little girls from the local Roma community danced in brightly coloured dresses at a community event. They clicked their fingers on outstretched arms and sang “ Ja tuke tuke ” to a furious klezmer beat. The audience clapped and twirled, unaware of the lyrics’ meaning: “Get away from me.”

N an talks of the old paradox that we have heard about all of our lives. The hardship of old times, versus the sense of togetherness that Travellers have lost. The gratitude for comforts that not long ago were undreamed of and unheard of, set against the moral corruption, unhappiness and constant malaise that have come from an overfast integration into the gorjies ’ consumerist world.

For centuries, politicians had guessed that if Gypsies could be settled in regular housing, then within a few short generations they would be just like everyone else. There would be no need for a word for outsiders, because we would be just like them. But that isn’t what has happened. Many Gypsies now live either in housing, or on permanent caravan sites, not in meadows or lanes or lay-bys or by the sides of old tips. And yet they are still what they are, changed in some ways, but different enough to draw the old line between themselves and the gorjies .

I sometimes wonder what Nan thinks I am. Of course, I am her great-grandson, born from her line, flesh and blood. But I’m not what she calls a “true Traveller”. Aside from my mixed roots, I wasn’t born to that life: I arrived into a changed era, one of stability, stasis, hot running water, and Christmases stacked with teetering piles of presents. The Romany bloodline never dies out. But the life of the Traveller changes, sometimes so much so that you could forgive the outside world for thinking the people themselves have vanished.

When I was small, Horsmonden in Kent was a typical Travellers’ horse fair. This meant that most people weren’t actually there for the horses. It’s true that a core of those who came, mostly men but quite a few women as well, were proper horse people. They came towing their boxes with strong cobs standing inside, tethered in the half-light; their two-wheeled sulkies – light trotting carts with a seat big enough for one or two people – and their harness, head collars and whips. But people came from far and near to the fair, and most of them weren’t interested in any equine displays. If they were, then it was simply because they provided an authentic backdrop. What they were interested in depended on the individual: but mostly, they were interested in each other. It is a quirk of our scatteredness: a few hundred thousand people at most, flecked across Britain’s damp islands, and we meet mostly at weddings, funerals and fairs. The horse trade has its ups and downs – as I write this, it’s down, the worst in my lifetime. But the horse fairs will persist, because their purpose goes beyond trade.

When the days are hot and tanned skins gleam with sweat in the sun, it is clear once again that horse fairs are shop windows for young brides and husbands. They always have been. This much, at least, is gospel, and proudly announced to journalists and inquisitive souls who come asking questions about the culture. But not every dalliance ends in a marriage, and rumours occasionally flare of unauthorised, ultra-brief flings at the fringes of fairs: dangerous liaisons that lead to bad names, fights, or worse, feuds that run on and on.

For the not so young, what they seek from each other is something subtler, less clear to outsiders, but an equally powerful draw. I suspect few would want to explain what it was, for fear of sapping its power by giving it voice. What the fairs offer is a chance to track the progress of our lives: to reminisce about previous years when we trod the same field, but equally to remark on how far we have come.

We polish and dress up our lives for the day and compare them to the lives of others, affirming their context, confirming their meaning. The fairs are where we remind ourselves who we are. It’s not that we don’t keep being who we are in between – of course we do. But the fairs provide a special concentration of Traveller experience, a tincture of what it is to be a Gypsy. At a horse fair we get to see, just for one day, what life would be like if the world shared our Gypsy priorities.

And then there are those who despise both horses and the fairs. For some families, the horse had its day a long time ago. I once asked my mate Charles if he and his family used to go to the fairs up north, which is where he comes from. He looked at me as though the question was perverse. “We don’t mind a day at the races, but Damian, can you see me or me dad, or any of us here, fucking about with horses? My great-great-grandad was a proper Gypsy man, and he was driving a Rolls-Royce a hundred year ago.”

T raveller culture, preoccupied though it can be with bygone times, has always preferred the tangible: today’s bread, the here and the now. As Nan says, “You can only eat one meal at a time.” In the past, writers took this as evidence that Gypsies inhabited a “heroic present”, lacking a sense of history and living so sharply in the moment that concepts such as deferred gratification were lost on them. I have always dismissed such ideas as inherently dangerous: they are liable to slide into essentialism, and the belief that races have irreconcilable differences. But maybe in turning so sharply away from a lie, I lost sight of a truth: that the present holds a finer promise than the past with its shadows and dust. In an inversion of the obvious, perhaps even the Traveller obsession with cemetery maintenance itself supports this view. After all, isn’t the act of placing flowers on a tomb a gesture of bringing a little life back to the dead?

After the fair at Horsmonden, I largely avoided gatherings of people, spending time in empty stopping places, visiting forlorn churches and well-kept graves. It is dawning on me that there is only so much I can learn from this. Another of Nan’s catchphrases comes to me: “There are no pockets in shrouds.” Perhaps this saying, a caution against overzealous pursuit of riches, masks a second meaning as well. There is a poverty to death; a limit to how much a skeleton can teach you about a life it no longer knows.

I realised how sparsely furnished my van was. Its naked pale blue surfaces stared at me like sheets of ice. For eight months, I had been travelling with what I thought were the bare essentials – bed, stove, wash gear, clothes and so forth. But there were other trappings of Romany life, when it was lived most richly: beautiful furnishings, gilded surfaces, portable pictures, talismans and silks. I’ve been missing a trick: the means by which a difficult life was rendered livable and even, at times, enviable.

When I asked Mum for help, she looked happy, as if pleased that I’d finally grasped the meaning of life. She gave me armfuls of folded materials. There was an Islamic purple velvet hanging, edged with golden stitching and arranged in a pattern of teardrops; matching Bedouin horse-cloths, constructed out of navy blue and orange-coloured diamond shapes of fabric; brightly coloured Indian tapestry cloths: two square ones, and one in the shape of an arch. They shouted in bright yellows and blues and greens and pinks, with tiny mirrors stitched into them alongside little embroidered birds, stars, flowers, chakra wheels and Hindu swastikas. I decorated the van, clipping the cloths to the plywood lining with bulldog clips and larger, stronger, rubber-tipped market grips.

The van was completely transformed. Its contents came together into a nomadic aesthetic all of its own; ramshackle, yet somehow making happy sense as a whole. My gran and grandad – Mum’s parents – wandered over to see what I’d been doing. They seemed stunned, but in a good way: “Looks like an old vardo ,” Grandad said, using the Traveller word for caravan. Gran remarked that the way I had hung the cloths reminded her of the inside of the Travellers’ square tents back when she was a little girl. Their approval came as a relief. I slammed the doors and smiled as I thought of the road ahead.

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This is an edited extract from The Stopping Places by Damian Le Bas, published by Chatto & Windus on 7 June. To order a copy for £10.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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The Language of the Scottish Traveller: A Dictionary

By pauline cairns speitel, introduction.

Pauline Cairns Speitel

A story of persecution

Gypsies − not at that time distinguished from other travelling folk − first appear in the written record in Scotland in 1505 as ‘tinkers, peddlers, dancers, raconteurs, guisers, and mountebanks’, and from an early date they attracted hostility. During the 1570s the Scottish authorities ordered them to quit the Gypsy life or risk deportation. Acts passed in 1579, ‘For punishment of the strong and idle beggars and relief of the poor and impotent’, mark ‘Egyptians’ out for special mention: ‘the idle peopil calling themselves Egyptians’. These Acts decreed that any person found to be a Gypsy ‘… and for those that have not whereupon to live of their own, that their ears be nailed to the tron [public weighing-machine] or to any other tree and their ears cut off and banished from the country; and if thereafter that they be found again, that they be hanged. In 1609, the Vagabonds Act was aimed at Gypsies, and four male members of the Faw family were hanged in 1611 for not maintaining a permanent address. Eight more men, six of them with the last name of Faa − a name whose history can be traced back 500 years − were hanged in 1624 for being ‘Egyptians’. In that year a new decree was issued that travelling Gypsy men would be arrested and hanged, Gypsy women without children would be drowned, and Gypsy women with children would be whipped and branded on the cheek. 

Such hostility was common throughout Europe. In England, for instance, the Egyptian Act of 1530 was passed to expel Gypsies from the realm, for being ‘lewd vagabonds’, conning the good citizens out of their money, and committing a rash of robberies. In 1562, Queen Elizabeth signed an order designed to force Gypsies to settle into permanent dwellings, or face death. Several were hanged in 1577, nine more in 1596, and 13 in the 1650s. And under King James VI and I (as he became), England began to deport Gypsies to the American colonies, as well as Jamaica and Barbados. Dumping undesirables such as ‘thieves, beggars, and whores’ in the colonies rapidly became a widespread practice, and Gypsies were clearly classified with such. This pattern has sadly continued across Europe to the present day, most notoriously when Roma, like Jews, were victims of Nazi industrialised murder.

Such attitudes have a sadly long history. An example appears in Grellmann’s 1787  Dissertation on the Gipsies  (trans. Raper, London, 1811, p 89): 

“Imagine a people of a childish way of thinking; their minds filled with raw, undigested conceptions; guided more by sense than reason; using understanding and reflection so far only as they promote the gratification of any particular appetite; and you have a perfect sketch of the Gipsies character.”

And John Hoyland ( Survey of the Customs, Habits Present State of the Gypsies: Secion VI ,  The Present Start of the Gypsies in Scotland , 1816, p 93) records the views of Sir Walter Scott, an otherwise famously sympathetic individual who modelled Meg Merrilees, one of his most colourful and memorable characters, on the well-known Borders Gypsy Jean Gordon:

“The distinguished northern Poet, Walter Scott, who is Sheriff of Selkirkshire, has in a very obliging manner communicated the following statement: ‘A set of people possessing the same erratic habits, and practising the trade of tinkers, are well known in the Borders; and have often fallen under the cognisance of the law. They are often called Gypsies, and pass through the county annually in small bands, with their carts and asses. The men are tinkers, poachers, and thieves upon a small scale. They also sell crockery, deal in old rags, in eggs, in salt, in tobacco and such trifles; and manufacture horn into spoons. I believe most of those who come through Selkirkshire, reside during winter, in the villages of Sterncliff and Spittal, in Northumberland, and in that of Kirk Yetholm, Roxburghshire … Mr. Reddel, Justice of Peace for Roxburghshire, with my assistance and concurrence, cleared this country of the last of them, about eight or nine years ago. They were thorough desperadoes, of the worst class of vagabonds. Those who now travel through this country, give offence chiefly by poaching, and small thefts. They are divided into clans, the principal names be Faa, Baillie, Young, Ruthven, and Gordon….’”

Such views certainly shaped the opinion of the authorities towards Scotland’s travelling peoples as late as the twentieth century.

Gypsies, along with other Travellers, have through the ages been made scapegoats for all sorts of crimes: stealing, murder and − distinctively − child stealing; we might recall the fears expressed when Harriet Smith encounters the Gypsies in Jane Austen’s  Emma  (1815). But, as Betsy Whyte, a twentieth-century Traveller, once remarked to me, “We have enough bother feeding oor ain bairns withoot getting mair that dinnae belang tae us.” And indeed, the reverse seems to have been the case, for the children of Gypsy and Travelling communities were often taken into care on the flimsiest of pretexts. Betsy, in her memoir  The Yellow on the Broom  (1979), recalls her father telling of a man called Hendry whose errant ways were explained thus: 

“[He] was brought up in a home you know. Any bairn that is taken away to they Homes is never right. When he was about nine he was gotten standing at the door of an inn. His mother and father were in the inn. The woman wasn’t drunk, but the authorities took the bairn anyway. She prigged [argued] with them, but it was no use. The woman broke her heart over her bairn and she died not long after that.”

As a result of such practices what we would now call social workers were known to Gypsies and Travellers as ‘the Cruelty’. The following account comes from Jess Smith’s memoir,  Way of the Wanderers  (2012): 

“It was snowing when Bridget heard the crunching of footsteps outside her tent Gerald was there piling sticks on the fire and she could hear him talking to some strangers. As she peered from the tent to see who it was, two shovel-shaped hands grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her from the tent. She landed on some logs and felt a sharp pain in her back. Gerald was lashing out with his fists all over the place and that was the last she saw before her body crumpled over and she lost consciousness.

Some minutes later, still in agony, Bridget opened her eyes to see people crowding round her with blankets. An elderly woman was washing blood from her face, but it was not her own blood. 

‘Gerald was fighting with the hornies [policemen] and the cruelty man, lassie. They’ve taken him off with them.’

Bridget was filled with terror, and asked where were her two children, three-year-old Rachel and nine-month-old Johnnie. 

‘Oh, my puir soul, they’ve taken the bairns awa tae,’ said the old woman, trying to wrap the blanket round Bridget’s shaking shoulders.

The young mother was unable to control her grief; and with dead eyes staring cold white sockets, she limped away from the bystanders and threw herself into the freezing waters of the River Tummel. No one was able to save her.

Locals burned the family’s tent and warned other Tinkers who were in the area about what had happened. The next day they were nowhere to be seen.”

The above is only one of various reports of similar tales of travelling folks’ lost children, including one where a mother is locked up in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Gypsy and Traveller children in Scotland were required by the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act to have a quota of attendances at school − one half-day counted as one attendance. This requirement gave the authorities − including, crucially, the Church of Scotland − carte blanche to intervene in their lives. And children suffered greatly from bullying in mainstream schools. Children can be cruel ordinarily, but in the case of cruelty to the children of Gypsies and Travellers it almost seemed to be sanctioned by the ‘othering’ visited upon them by adults. Jess Smith − who was later to become a successful writer and a powerful ambassador for her community − coolly describes her contact with school bullies thus ( Sookin Berries , 2008): 

“Bullies were everywhere when I was a child. Sometimes they waited for me outside school, sometimes inside. I was terrified. However, as I grew older I began to look upon them not so much as something to be frightened of but as a pesky problem. If approached properly such problems can be defeated, it’s just a matter of how much you want rid of them.”

And such bullying continued into adulthood. Jess’s father, Charlie Riley, who had unwittingly bought some stolen paint-spraying equipment, received a short prison sentence, and found that even among prisoners there was prejudice against Gypsies and Travellers. As he told Jess ( Jessie’s Journey , 2002): 

“Travellers were, and still are, looked upon as vermin. I was a travelling man who suffered regular beatings, both by fellow prisoners and guards alike. I was given the vilest chores to do. The tiny cell I shared with a mindless thug made me suffer constant attacks of breathlessness.”

Nowadays there are many fewer Gypsies and Travellers on the road, and the tent and ghallie [bow tent] of yesteryear have been replaced by larger caravans. Children’s education is generally treated more sympathetically, taking account of families’ lifestyles. The seasonal and casual work they engaged in is no longer available to them, and many of their traditional trades have been overtaken by technology, for example knife grinding. At the time of writing, labour imported from the continent of Europe has taken over berry-picking, and tattie howking is mechanised. The travelling life as it was known to Betsy Whyte, Sheila Stewart, Jess Smith, and their ancestors has vanished, like the ‘Mist Folk’ themselves. 

Who were the Gypsies and Travellers?

“In considering the Gypsies of Scotland, one is met at the outset by the difficulty of ascertaining the exact sense in which that word has been used. The genuine Gypsy, the swarthy, fortune-telling Romany of our fairs and race-courses is unmistakeable; but the term ‘Gypsy’ has been and still is loosely applied to many of fair complexion, who cannot speak a word of Romanes, and whose chief claim to be so designated is that they lead a wandering, unsettled life. These latter are also known by various other names; of which the most popular in Scotland are  Tinker or  Tinkler,  − and in earlier times,  caird,  − as also  horner, mugger  ( i.e.,  potter), and  faw,  these last terms being more specially limited to the Border districts.”

( Scottish Gypsies under the Stewarts  by David Macritchie, Edinburgh 1894, p. 1)

The Romani or Gypsy people are an ethnically distinct group, hailing originally from South India. Travellers are originally of Scottish descent, although sometimes in the modern period the two groups are regarded as a single entity. 

Gypsies and Travellers are, strictly speaking, two distinct communities. Gypsies in Britain and Ireland are originally immigrants from the continent of Europe, whose ultimate origins can be traced to South Asia. Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann ( Dissertation on the Gipsies , trans. Raper, London, 1787, p.83), noted that the first sightings on mainland Europe of peoples known as Egyptians had been as early as the fifteenth century: ‘they did not originate from our part of the world’. 

Gypsies brought with them, or developed, their own distinctive cultural practices, including the appointment of Kings of the Gypsies; Billy Marshall, perhaps the most famous of them all in Scotland, died in 1792 at the age of (allegedly) 120. He had fathered over 100 children, some (not all) by his 17 wives. And in the early years of their appearance in Scotland these practices seem to have been comparatively acknowledged. Thus, during the reign of James IV, an entry in the  Accounts of the Treasurer of Scotland  records a payment to Peter Ker of four shillings for the ‘King of Rowmanis’. The  Dictionaries of the Scots Language  ( https://dsl.ac.uk ) records another entry in the  Accounts  in which James IV commended an ‘Egyptian’ by the name of Antonio Gagino to the King of Denmark, offering a payment to ‘the Egiptianis, be the Kingis command, x Franch crounis’. Gagino, following the tradition that had developed among Gypsies of adopting fanciful titles, styled himself ‘The Earl of Grece’. Gypsies were also known for their colourful dress.

Travellers − with whom Gypsies were traditionally confused − are people from the indigenous population who have taken up an itinerant lifestyle. As far as Scottish Travellers are concerned one possible explanation is that they were originally Highlanders displaced by the Highland Clearances, or inhabitants from Perthshire and Aberdeenshire who had lost their property and land during the 1745 uprising. Gypsies historically were differentiated from Travellers by their distinctive names, such as Faw. However, many subsequently adopted Scots names, to conceal their identities; Travellers were similarly fluid in their nomenclature. Names common in both communities include Gordon, McDonald, Robertson, Smith, Townsley, Whyte, Williamson and Blyth. Gypsies in Scotland tended to gather in particular areas in Dumfries and Galloway, in Argyll, and in Berwickshire; one of the strongest and best documented ‘stopping places’ was the Border village of Kirk Yetholm. There were also communities in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire, especially around Blairgowrie. In today’s world, the label ‘Gypsy’ is no longer regarded as an insult and bearers of the name regard it as an indicator of a proud heritage.

The Dictionary and its Languages

The original inspiration for this Dictionary came from a slim volume  The Scottish Traveller Dialects  compiled by Jess Smith and Robert Dawson (Blackwell, Derbyshire 2002). However, the distinctive language of Scotland’s Gypsies and Travellers has never, to my knowledge, been brought together in dictionary form before.

This Dictionary offers the first substantial collection of words used by Gypsies and Travellers in Scotland, building on but going well beyond such classic lists such as those by the antiquarian Francis Grose (1785, 1787), or the updating of Grose by Pierce Egan (1823).

Captain Francis Grose, whose father was a jeweller of Swiss origin, was born about 1731 in Greenford, Middlesex. Grose had two careers, one military – he was adjutant and paymaster in the Surrey militia – and the other artistic. And although referred to by his military title his artistic career was by far the more successful. It was Grose’s interest in antiquities – he had been a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries – that led him to make trips to the slums of St Giles where he collected much of the material which encouraged him to compile a Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue which was originally published in 1785. Many of the words recorded by Grose were also in use by Scottish Gypsies and Travellers and can be seen to have a common root.

Incidentally, when travelling Scotland to research his Antiquities of Scotland Grose met with Robert Burns. When Burns asked him to include Alloway in his book Grose replied that Alloway was of no consequence and too small but if Burns could write a poem that would merit Alloway’s inclusion it would be added. The result was Tam o Shanter which made its first appearance in The Antiquities of Scotland (1797). 

Pierce Egan’s date of birth is uncertain, but he is first recorded as a printer’s apprentice in London in 1786. He then went on to become a sports writer but came to wider attention with the publication of his novel Life in London which documents the adventures of Corinthian Tom and his country cousin Jerry Hawthorn published in 1828. 

During his research for this book Egan became aware of the Flash Language (defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Connected with or pertaining to the class of thieves, tramps, and prostitutes” and in subsequent editions of Life in London he supplied a glossary. In 1823 he then ‘updated’ Grose’s work although it can be argued this was more to publicize his own works rather than improve Grose’s dictionary. Egan’s version was titled  Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue REVISED AND CORRECTED With the Addition of Numerous Slang Phrases Collected from Tried Authorities  by Pierce Egan this is then followed by a list of other works by Egan.

What Egan does not say is that he edited out some of Grose’s material thought by him too “coarse” or “broad”. (Perhaps this is an early development of Victorian mores.) However, because of his background as a sporting journalist he does include more definitions from the world of boxing, for example: “ chancery  getting your head ‘in chancery’, among pugilists, is when your  nob  [head] is completely at the mercy of your opponent.”

The Dictionary also draws on other classic accounts, e.g. George Borrow’s  Romano-lil a Word Book of the Romany  (John Murray, London 1874) which deals with the language of the English Gypsies. George Borrow (1803-1881) who was partly educated at the Royal High School in Edinburgh and then at Norwich Grammar School initially studied law but then discovered his main interests were languages and literature. Borrow travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa and as a result of these travels, developed a lifelong empathy with nomadic people such as Gypsies and Travellers. In the 1860s he visited Gypsy encampments in Wandsworth and Battersea after which he wrote his final book the above-mentioned  Romano-lil,  where between pages 17 and 101 he lists Romany words along with a detailed description of their grammatical categories. Borrow is still regarded as an authority in the field. 

Another source noted is a  New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language  by James Hardy Vaux (John Murray, London, 1819). This work is distinctive because it is accredited with being the first dictionary written and published in Australia. Vaux (b.1783) was a convict who had the distinction of being transported to Australia three times. After his eventual release in 1841 at the age of 59 he simply vanishes. Nothing is known of his life after this or the details of his death. Some of the language recorded here was also included by Vaux, which is a measure of the volume of Scottish Travellers and Gypsies sentenced to transportation.

Other later studies were also consulted. One such was H E Wedeck’s  A Dictionary of Gipsy Life and Lore (Philosophical Library, New York 1973). Wedeck, a scholar of the classics, was originally a native of Sheffield in England but made his career in America teaching classical languages in Brooklyn until he retired in 1968. His obituary in the New York Times of 14 July 1996 noted that “[he was] an observer of spheres beyond the norm” and “some of his excursions into the unusual … include a Dictionary of Astrology and a Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs”. He died at the age of 102. His dictionary, although slight in terms of content and lacking in discussion of sources, nevertheless paints a vivid picture of Gypsy life throughout the world.

Other modern works drawn upon include Timothy Neat’s  The Summer Walkers  (first published by Canongate Books in 1996 and republished by Birlinn 2002). Timothy Neat (b.1943−), although born in Cornwall, came to Scotland in the 1960s and immersed himself in all levels of Scottish culture. He has worked closely with many diverse Scottish luminaries, including Jean Redpath and Hamish Henderson. The Summer Walkers is the name given by Scottish Crofters to the Travelling People of the Highlands. Neat documents the lives of these itinerant people with sympathy and genuine respect for a way of life on the edge of extinction. Neat is also known for his work as an art historian, writer and film-maker.

Til Doomsday in the Afternoon  − subtitled  The folklore of a family of Scots Travellers, the Stewarts of Blairgowrie  (Manchester University Press 1986) is Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seegar’s study of the Stewarts and their language. It gives a vibrant picture of how Travellers lived during the twentieth century and how they became successful entertainers. 

Ewan MacColl – born James Henry Miller (1915-1989) – and American Peggy Seeger (b.1935−) were and are both political activists, folksingers, writers and collectors of material relating to alternative cultures. MacColl’s background was extremely political, his father having fled Scotland to find work after having been blacklisted in every foundry in that country. Seeger’s parents were Charles Seeger a noted American musicologist and the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. When they began their collaboration on the above title their original intention was to “compile a collection of traditional songs and ballads from the repertoire of a family of Scots Travellers − the Stewarts of Blairgowrie”. After two or three months of fieldwork they abandoned this idea as it was “swept away on a flood of recorded anecdotes, jokes, riddles, bawdy rhymes and traditional tales”.

MacColl and Seegar, as a result of their studies, were given a privileged insight into the lives of Travelling people seldom available to outsiders. The book was also completed in the late twentieth century and, at the time of writing this introduction, some of the contributors will still be alive. This gives the material documented here a real connection to language as it is currently spoken by Scottish Travellers.

Useful also was James Hayward’s  A Gypsy Jib  (Holm Oak Publishing 2003). ( Jib  is the Romany word for ‘tongue’, cf. Scots  chib  ‘razor’, presumably a metaphorically derived meaning.) Although Hayward is a descendent of the Scamp Gypsy clan and traces the Scamp family back to the early eighteenth century, his collection is no more than a list of Gypsy words found in England, albeit with reverse translation, i.e., Romany-English and English-Romany. Hayward does, however, through illustration and specialist notes, for example on names and his own Gypsy roots, paint a vivid picture of Gypsy life.

Other sources are derived from private correspondence. In 2013 I received an email from Paul Pope in Canada, a descendent of Scottish Travellers who had emigrated to there in the nineteenth century. Paul sent me a list of ‘Cant’ words still known to him and his extended family: an invaluable contribution. However, in Paul’s list were a few words that had clearly modified their meanings during the intervening years; some are compounds or phrases of other Traveller words, some I cannot trace. These forms may not be related to Travellers’ language, and I have therefore listed them in an Appendix.

This Dictionary includes terms traditionally referred to as  Romany , i.e. the inherited Indo-European variety spoken by Roma Gypsies and related to ancient Indian languages such as Sanskrit, and also the rather vaguely-conceived  Cant , i.e. vocabulary not found in standard British English that has historically been dismissed, generally contemptuously, as slang. Cant has itself several varieties associated with particular social groups, e.g. ‘thieves’ Cant; as this last example suggests, Cant can be deployed as a private or ‘hidden’ code, which is the feature about it which seems to have attracted antiquarians such as Grose or Egan. The term has generally been used with a pejorative connotation, but its neutral use in this Dictionary is an attempt at recuperating a handy term. Since varieties of Cant overlap, many of the words listed here as part of the language of Gypsies and Travellers will be found in other varieties as well.

There have been many lists made of Romany and Cant words but most have at best only sketchy etymological information. This Dictionary is intended to address this lack. The etymologies provided have been researched as far as possible but, given the age-old suspicions and prejudices against Gypsies and Travellers, sometimes the only information available is that a word is marked ‘(Cant)’ or ‘(Romany)’, and some words are completely untraceable. Informants are listed in the text by their initials; a list appears at the beginning of the Dictionary along with the abbreviations used for etymological sources. (For fuller definitions of the terms ‘Cant’ and ‘Romany’ see note below.)

Most of the vocabulary included in this Dictionary is common to all travelling folk in Scotland, but where there is a regional or other group restriction the relevant areas are indicated. Dates of attestation are given where known. It should be noted, however, that many entries are given the date ‘ 20- ’or ‘ 21- ’, since the only written records that can be found about a particular word are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries respectively. 

A sample entry illustrates the procedure adopted. Thus  yerra

m  ‘milk’ appears in this Dictionary as follows (for a guide to the pattern of entries see the section ‘A Guide to Reading Entries in the Dictionary’ below):

yarum, yerrim, yerum, yoarum, yorum  noun  milk: “ paplers and yerrim ” [porridge and milk]  la16-.  Compare  been yerum  [origin obscure but perhaps a development of Scots  yirn  ‘of milk, to form curds with rennet and the application of heat’; also   collected by EMcC/PS and RD; attested in Shelta;  yerim  attested by Galloway and Perthshire and Argyleshire Tinkler-Gypsies, SR, BS in TDITA and SS]

note:  Lexicon Balatronicum  (1811) and Grose and Egan (1823) attest the form  yarum  (milk) as ‘ Cant’ . Canadian Paul Pope (2013) also cites the form  yerrum  with the same meaning.

Many of the words described in the Dictionary share common ancestry (i.e. are cognate) with Scots, the language of many non-Gaelic speakers used in Scotland and parts of Ulster. However, it is often the case that, where a word or phrase is found in Scots, the meaning used by travelling folk is slightly different. Thus, Betsy Whyte in her autobiographical  Yellow on the Broom  refers to the River Tay as ‘the Burn’, using a word that in Scots means a smaller water-course, viz. a stream. Other examples include:

want, have a want  of an otherwise normal person  have an obsession or distorted view about a particular person or thing  20- . This usage derives from a Scots phrase which differs slightly in meaning, i.e.  have an intellectual disability, dating from the nineteenth century. The usage is attested by BW.

ba’ heid  [‘baw ‘heed]  noun  a person with a bald head  la20- .  baa-heided  adjective  silly, foolish: ‘The lassie’s better aff here. Four boys in that house, and each as baa-heided as the next.’ la20-. Scots  baw heid  ‘a fool; also a more general term of contempt’ is attested by JS;  baa heided  is attested by ET.

Other words in the Dictionary derive from Scots Gaelic, which is traditionally confined to the Scottish Highlands (although now undergoing something of a resurgence through Gaelic-medium education in the major Lowland cities). A variety of Scots Gaelic known as  Beurla Reagaird  ‘Richard’s Language’, the language of Gaelic-speaking Travellers, seems to be almost extinct. My main source of Richard’s Language or the language of the Highland Tinkers for this Dictionary was a website compiled by Jimmy Macdonald.

In addition, the lexicon of travelling folk includes words derived from  Irish Gaelic , and its varieties of known as  Shelta  and  Gammon ; the latter two are − or were − spoken by Irish Travellers. (It should be noted that the term Gammon is regarded by these Travellers as extremely pejorative.) 

*Cant  the following is the definition of Cant as it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary:

‘The peculiar language or jargon of a class: 

a. The secret language or jargon used by Gypsies, thieves, professional beggars, etc.; transf. any jargon used for the purpose of secrecy. 

b. The special phraseology of a particular class of persons, or belonging to a particular subject; professional or technical jargon. (Always  depreciative or contemptuous .)’

**Romany  the following is the definition of Romany as it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary:

‘1.  A member of a widely dispersed ethnic group, found mainly in Europe and North and South America, tracing its origins to South Asia;

2.  Now usu. in form Romani. The Indo-Aryan language of this people.

Romani is a member of the Central group of Indo-Aryan languages. Individual dialects of Romani manifest many regional variations reflecting contact with other languages.’

James Hayward’s  Gipsy Jib A Romany Dictionary  (Holm Oak Publishing,2003)   defines Romany thus:

‘ Romany  1 Descriptive of the Rom. This word is an adjective and equates to the word English. Originally there were two words depending on gender, i.e. Romano (masculine) and Romani (feminine). Of the two Romani has survived the better and is used almost exclusively and is mostly spelled  Romany . Romano does still exist in occasional use such as  Romano chiriclo   for a wagtail.

‘Romany  2. the English Gypsy language. This is the name applied to the language nowadays [2003]. It is an Anglicised form of Romanes.’