History

The Dom language has been described variably in the literature as the language of the Middle Eastern Gypsies, the language of groups known by the external appellations Nawar, Qurbat, Kauli or Gajar, or more commonly in recent research by the name Domari, based on the name attested in Jerusalem.

This trajectory is very similar to that displayed by the Romani language. This, along with similar historical socio-economic profiles of the two populations, Dom and Rom, suggests a shared heritage, but also boundaries: Both groups emerged in India. Their perpetual social isolation and stigmatisation appears to be connected to their historical position in the ancient caste system. Both groups migrated away from the Indian subcontinent and continued their specialisation in mobile trades. Their languages show similar archaic traits but also similar innovations. Yet the structural differences between their languages also suggest that they had always been separate populations that left India in separate migrations. While Romani is the only Indo-Aryan language spoken in Europe since medieval times, Domari is the only Indo-Aryan language based in Western Asia.

Fragmented documentation of the Dom language goes back to the late eighteenth century. Spanning a period of over a century there are attestations of lexicon and phrases from as far north as Azerbaijan to as far south as Sudan. We can therefore assume a historical spread of the language across this entire sphere. Dom lexicon will have also entered the special vocabularies of other populations specialising in itinerant trades; this is widely attested for example in Iran. In 1846 the German philologist August Pott published the first scientific account of the Dom language based on material collected in Beirut. This was followed by work by F. R. S. Newbold who in 1856 compared the speech of the Dom of Aleppo with that of various other communities in the Middle east specialising in itinerant trades.

The first comprehensive sketch of Dom grammar and vocabulary was Robert A. S. Macalister’s monograph on the Jerusalem dialect published in 1914. This was followed by work by Yaron Matras, published from 1999 onwards, on what appeared to be the same dialect in Jerusalem several generations later. Matras carried out his fieldwork among a group of around forty mainly elderly speakers residing in Jerusalem. In the meantime, at the time of writing, the language of the Palestinian Dom including in Jerusalem has become moribund, with knowledge of the full inflected language preserved by just a handful of speakers, perhaps even just two or three, who have little contact amongst themselves. In 2012 Bruno Herin published first impressions of the Dom dialect of Aleppo followed by a number of other works with fragmented documentation of other dialects from Syria and Lebanon. Moe Kitamura carried out recordings with a semi-speaker of Jerusalem Domari in 2020. In 2020 Kamal Kelzi launched the first YouTube channel devoted to the Dom language and culture, featuring Covid information in the language and introductory comments on language and history.