Ian Hancock

Ian Hancock (Romani: Yanko le Redžosko) is a renowned linguist, Romani scholar, and human rights advocate. He was born and raised in England, and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies.

He is director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies since 1972. He has represented the Romani people at the United Nations and served as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council under President Bill Clinton, who, according to Hancock, has Romani ancestry [Ian Hancock: "We Are the Romani People (Ame Sam E Rromane Džene)", Hertfordshire, Great Britain. University of Hertfordshire Press 2002.] . He also represented the Romani people at the 1997 Rafto Prize award ceremony.

Early life

Dr. Hancock's mother, Kitty, is Romnichal. However, his father Reginald (Redžo) is part Romungro: in particular, he is the descendant of a Hungarian speaker of North Central Romani named Benczi Imre. He inherited the surname "Hancock" through Imre's daughter Maria, who married a member of a British West Country showman family of that surname.

He lived in Canada for less than six years before moving back to England in 1961. There, he dropped out of 9th grade. This was not uncommon among Romanies; in fact, few or none of his other family members were literate.

He then took up several kinds of jobscite web
publisher=University of Texas at Austin
work=What's in a Name?:Professor takes on roles of Romani activist and spokesperson to improve plight of his ethnic group
url=http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/romani.html
title=UT report on Dr. Hancock] , including that of a spray painter. It was at this time that his roommates, university students from Sierra Leone, allowed him to learn the Krio language of that country. His knowledge of Krio and some academic connections helped him to enter the University of London. He was one of only two candidates in an affirmative action program who qualified to receive higher education.

In the late 1960s, he became a Romani rights activist after reading reports about anti-Romani discrimination in Britain. In particular, he took up the cause of Romani rights after British police caused a fire that killed two Romani children. In 1971, he graduated as the first Romani in Britain with a Ph.D., though he did not have a high school diploma or any other college degrees.

Romani studies

He has written more than 300 books, articles, and papers concerning the Romani people and language (particularly the Vlax dialect). These works analyze the Romani people not only through Romani linguistics but also through history, anthropology, and genetics. He has also been interviewed several times by news agencies covering reports having to do with Romanies, in addition to appearing in the documentary "American Gypsy" and generally answering questions about Romanies. He is currently in the process of writing a book called "On Romani Origins and Identity". [Ian Hancock. "On Romani Origins and Identity." To appear.]

Dr. Hancock supports some of R.L. Turner's views on Romani history based on the Romani language. In particular, he agrees that the Dom left India much earlier than the Romani people, and that the latter left no earlier than 1000 A.D. In fact, he claims that the Indian musicians mentioned in the "Shah-Nameh" and the "atsingani" mentioned in "The Life of St. George the Anchorite", both of which were previously believed to be ancestors of the Romani people, may have been the ancestors of the Domari people but not those of the Romani people. It is possible, in his view, that the Lom split off from the Romani people on reaching Armenia.

Contrary to the popular view that the Romani people are descended from low-caste Indians who brought their occupations to Europe, he argues that the Romani people are descended from Indian prisoners of war of Mahmud of Ghazni. As evidence, he points to the presence of Indic words specifically of military origin and to a Banjara oral legend telling of Rajputs who left India through the Himalayas during the Ghaznavid invasions and never returned. [Ian Hancock. "The Emergence of Romani as a Koïné Outside of India." "Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies", Hertfordshire, Great Britain. University of Hertfordshire Press 2000.]

He also believes that the Romani language originates in a koiné language, which he calls "Rajputic," between the many Indian languages spoken by the prisoners of war. In this regard, he finds it similar to several other Indian languages, especially Hindustani.

Creole language studies

Aside from his seminal research on the Anglo-Romani language, Hancock is an internationally recognized scholar on creole languages. In addition to his research on Krio, Hancock has done important research on the Gullah language of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and the Afro-Seminole Creole language spoken in Southwest Texas. Hancock was the first scholar to recognize that a version of Gullah, he calls Afro-Seminole, is spoken by a community of Black Seminole descendants in Brackettville, Texas. Hancock later did research on another variety of Afro-Seminole spoken in a village called Nacimiento in the Mexican state of Coahuila.

References

External links

* [http://www.radoc.net/ Romani Archive and Documentation Center]
* [http://www.geocities.com/~Patrin/pariah-contents.htm "The Pariah Syndrome" by Prof. Hancock]
* [http://www.geocities.com/~Patrin/lewy.htm "Downplaying the Porrajmos: The Trend to Minimize the Romani Holocaust" by Ian Hancock]

Persondata
NAME=Hancock, Ian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Rejosko, Yanko le
SHORT DESCRIPTION=British linguist
DATE OF BIRTH=
PLACE OF BIRTH=
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=