Norwegian and Swedish Travellers

Norwegian and Swedish Travellers
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Norwegian_and_Swedish_Travellers".

The Norwegian and Swedish Travellers (Norwegian: romanifolket; Swedish: resande) are a group or branch of the Roma people (also known as "Gypsies") in Norway and Sweden. The estimated number of Roma Travellers in Sweden is 20,000,¹ while in Norway the number is probably less than 10,000.

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1 Origins
2 Names for the group
3 Language
4 Sources
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

Origins

By history and culture, they are related to similar groups of Roma people in other countries, such as the Romnichals and Sinti.

Modern-day Travellers are the descendants of the first Roma that arrived in Scandinavia during the 16th century. Some were deportees from Britain to Norway,²³ but most came via Denmark.⁴

A related group are the Finnish Kale, who are the descendants of early Scandinavian Roma that had been deported in the 17th century from Sweden proper to Finland, the latter a province of the Swedish Empire at the time.⁵ Over the years, the Finnish Kale developed separately from the other Scandinavian Travellers (particularly after Finland was lost to the Russian Empire in 1809), and their languages and customs now differ markedly. The Finnish Kale, however, maintain that their ancestors had originally come from Scotland,⁶ thereby supporting the idea that they and the Scandinavian Travellers are distantly related to present-day Romnichals.

Roma Travellers in Norway at times have been confused with the indigenous Norwegian Travellers, although they perceive the latter group to be non-Roma by culture and origins.

Names for the group

By the settled majority population, the Norwegian Travellers are known as tatere, and in Sweden they used to be called tattare. Both terms hint to the original misconception that these people were Tatars. Before the turn of the 20th century, the majority population made little distinction between tatere/tattare and "Gypsies" (Norwegian: sigøynere; Swedish: zigenare);⁷ this situation changed mainly due to the arrival of Kalderash Roma from Russia and Central Europe in the last decades of the 19th century, to whom the latter term came to be applied almost exclusively.

Skojare was a former name for Travellers in Sweden; in Norway skøyere was associated with indigenous Travellers. Fant was another term formerly applied to both Roma and non-Roma Travellers in southern Norway and some parts of Sweden. All these terms nowadays are considered pejorative due to their connotation of vagabondage and vagrancy.⁸

In Sweden, tattare is now considered a disparaging term and has been completely abandoned in official use. Since 2000 Swedish Travellers are officially referred to as resande (Travellers), and counted as one of several groups within the Roma national minority. They often refer to themselves as resandefolket (Travelling people), or dinglare. Less common is the term tavringar. In recent years there has been an attempt to term Swedish Travellers as tschiwi, but this usage is contested.

For Norwegian Travellers, however, the name tatere does not carry the same stigma as in Sweden; some Traveller organizations maintain this term in their official names. In Norway the Travellers are categorized as a national minority group, officially referred to as tatere, reisende (Travellers) or romanifolk. Norwegian Travellers refer to themselves by various names, such as romany, romanoar, romanisæl, vandriar (Wanderers), etc. In contrast to Sweden, in Norway a distinction is made between romanifolket and rom (i.e., Roma groups that arrived since the 19th century) in the official legislation on national minorities.

Language

The Travellers in Sweden and Norway speak a form of the Romani language known to academics as Scandoromani, sometimes referred to as Tavringer Romani.