Indigenous Norwegian Travellers

The indigenous Norwegian Travellers are an ethnic minority group in Norway. They are a wandering people who once travelled by foot, with horse-drawn carts and with boats along the southern and southwestern coastline of Norway.

Names for the group

Known to the settled majority population as skøyer and fant, they prefer the term reisende ('travellers'). This term is also used by the so-called Tater people (the largest population of Romani people in Norway and Sweden), though the two groups are distinct.

Eilert Sundt, a 19th-century sociologist, termed the indigenous Travellers småvandrer or småvandringer ('those who make shorter journeys'), to contrast them with the Romani Travellers (which Sundt called storvandrer or storvandringer), who ranged further in their journeys.[1]

Language

The indigenous Norwegian Travellers used to speak their own language, known as the Rodi language.

References

  1. ↑ Hazell, Bo (2002). Resandefolket: Från tattare till traveller (in Swedish). Stockholm: Ordfront. p. 401. ISBN 91-7324-682-4. OCLC 185986575.

Further reading

  • Sundt, Eilert (1852). Beretning om Fante- eller Landstrygerfolket i Norge: Bidrag til Kundskab om de laveste Samfundsforholde (in Norwegian) (2nd ed.). Christiania: J. Chr. Abelsted. OCLC 7451358.
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