Who are the Roma?
Ten to twelve million strong, a thousand years out of India — survivors of slavery, of the Nazi genocide, and of Europe’s oldest prejudice.
Last updated: October 2026
The Roma are Europe’s largest ethnic minority, numbering an estimated 10 to 12 million people, with communities on every continent. Originally from northwestern India, they migrated westward a thousand years ago — and have faced a thousand years of persecution, culminating in the Nazi genocide that killed up to half a million Roma.
The Roma trace their ancestry to northwestern India. The evidence is linguistic: the Romani language belongs to the Indo-Aryan family, and its grammar and core vocabulary are closely related to the languages of northern India, above all to the languages spoken in Rajasthan and Punjab. Romani also carries the marks of the journey westward, with layers of borrowed words from Persian, Armenian, Greek, and the Slavic languages picked up along the way. The ancestors of the Roma left India around a thousand years ago, though the exact date and the reasons for the migration are still debated by historians. What is clear is that the migration was gradual, spread over generations, and that by the Middle Ages Romani-speaking communities were living in the Byzantine Empire.
From the Byzantine world, Roma communities spread across Europe. They reached the Balkans in the fourteenth century and western Europe in the fifteenth, where their arrival was recorded in town chronicles and royal safe-conducts. The English word Gypsy, and its equivalents in several European languages, came from a mistaken belief that the newcomers had come from Egypt, a confusion that later hardened into an exonym many Roma today consider a slur. The word Roma itself comes from the Romani word rom, meaning man or husband, with romni for wife; in the Romani language, Roma means people. Not every community uses the word Roma for itself: Sinti in Germany and central Europe, Manouche in France, Kale in Spain and Wales, Romanichals in England, and other groups have their own names, and many also accept Roma as a shared umbrella term, the usage adopted by the Council of Europe. The respectful rule is to use the name a community uses for itself.
Roma communities are diverse, and the single image of the wandering caravan is a stereotype, not a description. Many Roma have been settled for centuries, in villages, towns, and cities, working as farmers, craftspeople, traders, musicians, and laborers. Others maintained traveling ways of life, often built around seasonal work such as horse trading, metalwork, entertainment, and harvest labor. Romani is spoken in many dialects, and many Roma also speak the majority language of the country where they live. There is no single Roma religion: Roma communities include Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Muslims, and Pentecostals, among others, and religious life generally follows the majority faith of the surrounding region.
Music is the Roma contribution best known to the wider world, and it is real, though it should not be reduced to a costume. Roma musicians shaped Hungarian Romani music, played central roles in flamenco in Spain, and carried brass-band and violin traditions across the Balkans. Django Reinhardt, a Manouche guitarist born in Belgium in 1910, created a style of jazz, now called gypsy jazz or jazz manouche, that is still played worldwide; he played with only two fully working fingers on his left hand after a fire injured him as a young man. The singer Esma Redzepova of North Macedonia, called the Queen of Romani Song, brought Romani music to international audiences. Roma writers, filmmakers, and scholars have built a Romani literature and press in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Romani-language journals and the work of poets such as Papusza, a Polish Roma poet whose work was first published in the 1950s.
The history of the Roma in Europe is, for long stretches, a history of persecution. In the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in what is now Romania, Roma were enslaved for centuries, bought and sold as property, until slavery was abolished in the mid-nineteenth century, with full emancipation coming in 1856. Elsewhere in Europe, states issued edicts ordering Roma to settle, to leave, or to be expelled, and in the early modern period Roma in several countries were punished with whipping, branding, or execution for the offense of being Roma. In the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century, Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II pursued policies of forced assimilation, including the removal of Roma children from their families. These policies are documented in imperial decrees; their effects on the communities targeted were devastating.
The worst chapter came under the Nazis. The regime persecuted Roma as racial outsiders, and during the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Roma were murdered in camps and killing fields across occupied Europe. Estimates of the death toll vary: historians commonly cite figures between about 220,000 and 500,000, with the uncertainty reflecting the destruction of records and the difficulty of identifying victims. The Romani word for this genocide is Porajmos, meaning the Devouring. At Auschwitz, a special Gypsy camp held Roma families until August 1944, when most of its remaining prisoners were murdered in the gas chambers. The genocide was long under-acknowledged: West Germany did not formally recognize the Nazi persecution of Roma as racially motivated until 1982, and the first official memorial to the murdered Roma in Berlin was unveiled only in 2012. The short answer's figure, up to half a million killed, sits at the upper end of the scholarly range and reflects the scale of a crime whose exact toll may never be known.
Persecution did not end with the war. In Czechoslovakia, Roma women were forcibly sterilized under policies that continued into the post-communist period, a practice later acknowledged and condemned by the Czech government. Across Europe today, Roma communities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and policing, a finding repeated by surveys of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and by reports from the Council of Europe and Amnesty International. Many Roma children still attend segregated schools or classes in several countries, despite court rulings against the practice. The Roma are not a problem to be solved: they are Europe's largest ethnic minority, and their treatment is widely regarded by human rights bodies as a measure of Europe's commitment to its own stated values.
The modern Romani movement began in earnest in 1971, when the First World Romani Congress met in London. The Congress adopted a flag, blue for the sky and green for the earth, with a red sixteen-spoked wheel at its center, and an anthem, Gelem, Gelem, a song that speaks of the long road and the persecution the Roma have endured. April 8, the date of the Congress's opening, is now observed as International Romani Day. The Congress also pressed for the word Roma to replace Gypsy in official usage. Since then, Romani organizations have worked at the European level, and the European Union has adopted framework strategies for Roma inclusion, with mixed results that critics attribute to weak enforcement and limited funding.
Today, Roma communities live on every continent, with the largest populations in Europe. The Council of Europe estimates ten to twelve million Roma in Europe, though census figures are far lower, partly because many Roma do not declare their ethnicity on censuses, and partly because official counts have historically been unreliable. The largest populations are believed to live in Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary, and Slovakia, with significant communities in France, Italy, Serbia, and North Macedonia. Roma in the Americas, including communities in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, trace their arrival to several waves of migration from the nineteenth century onward. The Roma story is a thousand years of migration, survival, and cultural creation, carried on by people who have remained themselves through slavery, genocide, and centuries of contempt, and who continue to argue, in their own voices, for a place in Europe that is theirs by history and by right.
- Yaron Matras, The Romani Gypsies (Harvard University Press) — the standard English-language history and linguistic survey.
- Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People (University of Hertfordshire Press) — history and identity by a Romani scholar.
- Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Wiley-Blackwell) — a general history of the Roma in Europe.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on the Nazi persecution and genocide of the Roma.
- Council of Europe, on Roma population estimates and the Roma and Travellers Division.
- European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, surveys on discrimination against Roma in the EU.
- Amnesty International, on forced sterilization and segregation of Roma in Europe.
- International Romani Union, on the 1971 World Romani Congress, flag, anthem, and International Romani Day.