Romanian, Not Romany: Some Swede Officials Got Confused

A local newspaper in the Swedish town of Helsingborg, Dagblad, reported something humorously peculiar. Apparently, some officials in this part of Sweden didn’t know the language of the Romanians or were at least confused with the name of the Romanian language.

The story was picked up by The Local, an English news source in Sweden, and published details on the curious case of interpreters hired by the municipal government speaking the wrong language. The interpreters were supposed to serve as the link of the local Helsingborg government in communicating with the migrants on a continuing basis.

The incident was not just a one-event case. The municipality of Helsingborg sought the help of translators to help the Romanian migrants in communicating with numerous government institutions and officials including health care workers and the police. The problem did not happen in just one municipal program or event. The translators enlisted had been the ones doing “translations” for Romanian migrants for some time as they tried communicating with municipal offices. It took time before the mistake was detected, made public, and rectified.

Romany vs. Romanian

This problem of wrong translators chosen can be traced to the failure of the Helsingborg officials to distinguish Romany from Romanian. They wrongly picked Romany translators perhaps under the assumption that Romany is just another word for Romanian or that Romany and Romanian are one and the same.

Romanian is the language of the Romanians. Romany is a language with roots in the Roma and Sinti culture.

In Sweden, just like elsewhere, Romany and Romanian are pronounced differently although there’s a possibility that something was “lost in pronunciation.” An official may have misheard the instructed language as “row-main-ey,” which wouldn’t be that distinctly different from “row-main-yan” when spoken hurriedly or inaudibly. It is also possible that the person responsible for choosing the translators naively assumed that there is no other language that sounds like “Romanian.” Romany, by the way, may also be written as Romani so a misunderstanding with the spellings could also be a possible cause for the confusion.

Lucian Bagiu, a linguistics faculty and Romanian language researcher at Lund University, said that Romanians are just like Swedes when it comes to understanding Romany. They don’t understand the language. Bagiu added that there are even more similarities between the Swedish and British languages compared to similarities between Romanian and Romany. Moreover, the Romanian language has roots in the Latin language. Romany, on the other hand, evolved from Sanskrit.

Denial

Expectedly, officials of Helsingborg attempted to downplay the issue by claiming that the language barrier did not prevent the municipal government from communicating with the Romanian migrants. Municipal official Per Pehrsson told Dagblad newspaper that there hasn’t been any problem in communicating with the migrants with the assistance of the interpreters the local government has. On the contrary, however, one Romanian migrant interviewed by Dagblad said that they did not understanding anything, that they were not helped by the wrong language interpreters hired by the local government before. Accordingly, they were only able to have sensible conversations when a real Romanian interpreter was brought in.