Bulgarian Instagram user Hristiyan Mitkov recently published a unique video that has fascinated viewers by showing astonishing proof of the ancient connection between the Romani language and modern Hindi. The clip shows how deep this link is by showing words that have stayed the same or almost the same over a huge distance in time and space.
Hristiyan, who comes from one of the oldest Bulgarian Roma groups, proudly said that his family “left India 1,500 years ago.” Even after all this time, the Romani language has kept many of the same features as other Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and Gujarati.
Words That Are the Same Across Continents
Hristiyan works with a Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi speaker in the viral video to show terms that are the same in all three languages. Many people are most surprised to learn that they use the same terminology for everyday things:
In both languages, “paani” means “water.”
The word for “ear” is “kaan.”
It’s not simply a coincidence that they look alike. Many more words in Hristiyan’s dialect of Romani are easy for South Asian speakers to understand. The term for snake is “saanp,” and the word for fish is “machcho.” There are also little changes in pronunciation. For example, the Romani word for “comb” is “kaangli,” which sounds almost the same as the Hindi/Urdu word “kanghi.” The Romani word for “goat” is “bakro,” which sounds like the Hindi/Urdu word “bakra.”
Who are the Romani? The Trip from South Asia
This language evidence backs up what historians and geneticists have known for a long time: the Romani people, also known as Roma or Romanies (the preferred terms over the old “Gypsies”), are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group.
The Roma used to live a nomadic life, which helped them spread out over a large area. Studies of language and genetics show that their ancestors came from South Asia, notably the areas that are now Punjab, Rajasthan, and Sindh in northwest India and Pakistan. Between the 5th and 11th centuries, they moved to Europe in multiple waves. The first groups arrived in Europe between the 7th and 14th centuries.
Today, the Romani people live in numerous countries, but the largest groups are in Eastern and Central Europe, such as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia.
A Work of Art in Language
The video’s discoveries have really hit home with people who saw it online. Many of them were truly shocked by how similar the languages were. “I can’t believe it,” said one commenter. I knew they came from India, but I never thought that Gypsy languages could be so similar to Hindi and Urdu. Someone else said it best when they called the film a “masterpiece of linguistics, history, and semiotics.”
The connection also brought back memories from the past. One Bulgarian woman said, “I remember my dad telling me that when he was a teenager in the 1960s, he would go to the movies and little Roma kids would sneak in to watch Bollywood movies.” Later, they would declare they understood everything, even that the actors were speaking Romani. This anecdotal evidence, along with the hard linguistic facts, gives us a dramatic and moving look at a history that goes back thousands of years.