The Manchester Romani Project is part of an international network of scholarly projects devoted to research on Romani language and linguistics, coordinated in partnership with Dieter Halwachs (Institute of Linguistics, Graz University and Romani-Projekt Graz), and Peter Bakker (Institute of Linguistics, Aarhus University).
The project explores the linguistic features of the dialects of the Romani language, and their distribution in geographical space. An interactive web application is being designed, which will allow users to search and locate on a map different dialectal variants, and to explore how variants cluster in particular regions. Examples sentences and words with sound files will also be made available, to give impressions of dialectal variation within Romani. From the distribution of linguistic forms among the dialects it will be possible to make infeences about social-historical contacts among the Romani communities, and about migration patterns.