Nomads, Language and Land

Abstract

Cultures and languages are frequently perceived as rooted in a particular territory but this is hardly relevant for groups that have maintained nomadic rather than sedentary lifestyles over the centuries and regarded state territorial boundaries as irrelevant. Such groups ‘could teach us how meaningless frontiers are: careless of boundaries, Romanies and Sinti are at home all over Europe. They are what we claim to be: born Europeans’ (Grass 1992: 108).