Romani Language Resources: Home

Overview

The University of Kansas (KU) Libraries house one of the most comprehensive Romani‑language and Romani‑studies collections in the US Midwest. Built within the larger Slavic & Eurasian Collection—itself more than 500 000 volumes—these holdings give scholars unusually deep coverage of Romani linguistics, literature, and culture across Europe and the Near East.

Historical Development

Romani acquisitions began in the early 1990s but accelerated after Geoff Husić (Slavic & Near East Studies Librarian, Watson Library) assumed responsibility for Balkan and linguistics collections in 2003. Husić’s field contacts in the Balkans and Central Europe, coupled with targeted approval plans, steadily filled gaps in primary texts, dialect descriptions, and lexicography. His parallel research—e.g., Tracking the History of Romani Publications and the open‑access Romani Language Dictionaries: (1755‑2019) An Annotated Critical Bibliography—created the bibliographic roadmap that still guides KU selection today.

Size and Scope (2025 estimate)

Counts compiled from Voyager catalogue snapshots and internal tally sheets maintained by International Collections, April 2025.

Collection Highlights

• Lexicography core – first editions of Franz Miklosich’s Romänische Grammatik (1872–80) and Gilliat‑Smith’s English‑Gypsy Dictionary (1915); modern standards such as Matras’s Romani: A Linguistic Introduction and Boretzky & Ivanova’s dialect atlases.

• Rare regional grammars – mimeographed descriptive sketches from socialist‑era Yugoslavia and unpublished Soviet field notes on Crimean Romani.

• Literary corpus – bilingual editions of Papusza, Usin Kerim, and contemporary Roma poets from Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, and Turkey.

• Holocaust documentation – monographs and grey literature on the Porajmos, including early‑post‑war German and Czech investigations hard to find outside Europe.

• Digital assets – KU ScholarWorks hosts Husic’s born‑digital bibliographies and datasets on Romani orthography and Unicode issues, freely downloadable.