Sinti

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Sinti or Sinta (Singular masc.=Sinto; sing. fem.=Sintisa) is the name of some communities of the nomadic people usually called "Gypsies" in English. This includes communities known in German and Dutch as Zigeuner and in Italian as Zingari. They are closely related to, and are usually considered to be a subgroup of, the Roma people. The origin of the name "Sinti/Sinte" is unclear, although it bears a similarity to the toponym Sindh (and inhabitants' name, the Sindhis), the area which linguistic and cultural evidence indicates was the likely geographic origin of the Roma, in the Southeast of what is today Pakistan.

While the Sinti were, until quite recently, chiefly nomadic, today only a small percentage of the group remains unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities, generally in squalor.

The Sinti arrived in Germany and Austria in the Middle Ages, eventually splitting into two groups: Eftavagarja ("the Seven Caravans") and Estraxarja ("from Austria"). These two groups then expanded, the Eftavagarja into France, where they assimilated into the local Roma groups (Manouches), and the Estraxarja into Italy and Eastern Europe, mainly what are now Croatia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eventually adopting various regional names.

In Italy they are present mainly in Piedmont region.

The Sinti have produced a great number of renowned musicians, such as jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. The Sinto Häns'che Weiss produced a record in Germany in the 1970s in which he sang about the Poraimos (Roma Holocaust) in his own language. This caused a furore among his people who did not want the language to be made known to the "Gadje". Many younger Germans first learned about this part of Holocaust history as a result of this recording. Titi Winterstein and several members of Reinhardt's clan still play traditional and modern "Gypsy jazz" all over Europe. The jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul was also of Sinte (sintenghero) descent.

The Sinti speak a dialect of the Romany language called "Romanes, Sintenghero Tschib(en)", which is fully Romany by vocabulary, with primarily only grammatical differences, and exhibits strong German influence.

[edit] Other theories

Another theory holds that the Roma differ from the Sinti in that the former converted to Islam in the Seljuq Empire, thus acquiring citizenship and escaping slavery. The Sinti, on the other hand, allegedly refused to convert to Islam and thus remained in slavery. ^[1]