DIDICOI.

February 15, 2012 by 45 Comments

My wife and I have been enjoying a DVD of the delightful British detective series Midsomer Murders (thanks, Eric!), and the episode we watched last night, “Blood Will Out,” taught me a new word, didicoi. It’s apparently a purely U.K. term, because none of my U.S. dictionaries have it, not even the imposing Webster’s Third New International, but the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has it: “didicoi … a Gypsy or other nomadic person. Origin C19: perh. an alt. of Romany dik akei ‘look here’.” The etymology doesn’t look very convincing on the face of it, but after all they do say “perhaps,” and it’s often hard to figure out where such dialect terms come from. At any rate, I was wondering if my non-Yank readers are familiar with it, and if so whether it has a derogatory connotation or is a reasonably neutral term. It’s certainly an enjoyable word to say.

Comments

  1. David L says
    February 15, 2012 at 8:46 pm

    By odd coincidence, I grew up in the town that is used as the location for Causton in Midsomer Murders. “Didicoi” (variously spelled, as I recall) was a familiar term. It’s hard to say whether it was derogatory. Gypsies were not held in high regard, shall we say, so any name for them had negative connotations, but not necessarily on account of the word itself. From what I understand, it’s bad form to talk about Gypsies these days; they are Romanies, or travelers. I may well have this wrong…

  2. John Cowan says
    February 15, 2012 at 9:04 pm

    The last quotation in the OED2 agrees with my vague memory, that it’s a Romany term for non-Romany travelers:
    1966 Guardian 3 Nov. 4/6 ‘Didicoys’—the Irish tinkers and other nomads around London who far outnumber the true Romanies.
    Various pages around the net suggest that it may (also?) mean a person of mixed Romany and non-Romany ancestry. The most authoritative-looking of these is an article by Ian Hancock (in JSTOR), who is a “linguist, Romani scholar, and political advocate”. (WP)
    David has it right: any term for a despised minority is probably an insulting term by nature, unless it was just invented last week.

  3. Eel says
    February 15, 2012 at 9:35 pm

    I know the word didicoi as it was just a normal term for gypsies where I’m from in England (Norfolk, East Anglia) I say was because I haven’t heard it for a long time and of course you were more likely to hear “pikey” especially as a derogatory term.
    I live in an area now where people have never heard of the word “didicoi” so I assumed it was a Norfolk/East Anglian dialect term but it seems to be a word from the countryside rather than the cities.

  4. DG says
    February 15, 2012 at 9:53 pm

    I’ve heard the term ‘diddikai’ used to refer to someone of part-Roma (generally half) origin.

  5. David L says
    February 15, 2012 at 10:10 pm

    John, that’s interesting: the Romanies use didicoi as a (presumably) contemptuous term for travelers who are not of their kind, and then we (the resident white folks) use it to refer to any nomads, Romany or not. I guess, alas, we all need someone to look down on.

  6. MMcM says
    February 15, 2012 at 10:21 pm

    Eel also mentioned it in the Gyp post.

  7. Eel says
    February 15, 2012 at 10:56 pm

    @MMcM
    Oh, I completely forgot about posting that comment and it just shows that due to never seeing the word written down I’ve never been consistent in spelling “didicoi” (which looks a bit mock-Greek to be honest) I’d probably settle for “diddicoy”.

  8. Etienne says
    February 16, 2012 at 12:37 am

    DIK AKEI might be a more credible etymon for DIDICOI if we assume the final /k/ of DIK was unreleased (any specialists on Romani phonetics out there?). For outsiders to mistake this hard-to-perceive consonant for a second /d/ seems quite plausible to me. And exonyms are very often derived from frequent utterances in the group’s language: French “chtimi” to designate Picard speakers (from Picard “this…(to) me”) is an example that comes to mind.
    The above assumes, of course, that the term originally designated romany-speakers and only later came to designate other travellers and/or people of mixed descent.

  9. Stuart says
    February 16, 2012 at 1:18 am

    I love how two of the suggested etymologies strongly hint at Roma’s Indic origin. “dik” for “look” is not much of a stretch from modern Hindi’s “dekh” the idea that diddikai meant “half Roma” made me think of “dedh”, “one and a half”. That latter’s a stretch, I know, but I like seeing words that remind me how far those travellers really have travelled.

  10. mollymooly says
    February 16, 2012 at 1:47 am

    I’ve never heard didicoi in Ireland, where there were very few Romani till the EU’s eastern expansion.

  11. Geraint Jennings says
    February 16, 2012 at 2:24 am

    “The Diddakoi”, classic children’s book by Rumer Godden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diddakoi

  12. Catanea says
    February 16, 2012 at 3:57 am

    It’s probably been covered somewhere, but does all this “dik” & “dekh” explain why the English say “have a decco” for “have a look”, which I’ve always found completely opaque…?

  13. Stuart says
    February 16, 2012 at 5:00 am

    Yes, Catanea, “dekho” is a straight loan from the Hindi imperative (2nd person familiar) for look. Sorry, but I can never remember how to spell it the English way.

  14. Electric Dragon says
    February 16, 2012 at 5:53 am

    It’s usually spelt “dekko” – it came to English via British soldiers posted in India during the Raj. It’s very old-fashioned now, and has overtones of “Boy’s Own” pulp adventure stories.

  15. Peter says
    February 16, 2012 at 6:54 am

    My father used to use the word thirty or forty years ago (around Peterborough, so sort of East Anglia again).
    From him it was definitely meant to be disparaging, worse than “gypsy”: in fact I think what he meant by it was “not a proper gypsy” and hence someone who did not have the excuse of tradition and romance for their unsettled ways.
    I would have spelled it ‘diddicoy’, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it written before.

  16. Tom says
    February 16, 2012 at 7:07 am

    Grew up in the Fens (also East Anglia). To me it’s quite old-fashioned but definitely derogatory; doubt you’ll find many slang terms for ‘gypsy’ in that region without negative connotations though!

  17. Paul says
    February 16, 2012 at 7:10 am

    Diddicoi is also used in Hampshire, so is probably a quite widespread country word. As I understand it, it usually refers to travellers who are not Romani, and often to people regarded as travellers, but who are long settled. In one instance I know, a long-established family of car dealers are known as diddicoi, in this case not pejoratively, though that is often the case. Pikey is most definitely prejorative.

  18. Michael Peverett says
    February 16, 2012 at 7:27 am

    The Dancing Did were a 1980s cult band from Evesham Worcestershire – their name (and one of their songs) meant The Dancing Didicoi, and the usage was very definitely not pejorative; though none of the band were gypsies, so far as I know. But as other posts have shown it was used pejoratively in many places and contexts.
    David L’s comment is sensible – “Pakistani” and “Jew” are pejorative words in the mouth of a Nazi. The tactical move by which originally insulting terms become adopted as badges (impressionist, queer) is familiar, of course.
    The word Gypsy is widely used by young Gypsies and the BBC webmasters use it, along with “Romany” “Roms'” “Romany Gypsies”, here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/romany_roots/
    (Ironically, the Romany Roots messageboard, which was far the most interesting thing about the site, has been discontinued: “Following extensive user feedback, the editorial focus of the BBC Kent website has changing to enhance our coverage of local news-related issues and features.” Alas, the seemingly perennial mismatch between the “local” (i.e. settled) and the traveller continues… )

  19. Paul says
    February 16, 2012 at 8:50 am

    (After posting, as usual) I went back to my 80-year-old source for the Hampshire usage, and must make corrections. In his youth, diddicoi (or didi-kI as he says it) was used for non-Gipsy travellers, but no longer differeniates. His car dealer friends firmly identify themselves as Gipsy though they “live in million pound houses” and have not travelled in several generations. Adn they are called diddicoi locally, but not to their faces, he says.
    In the interests of research, he is going to ask them next time he sees them what they think of the word ….

  20. languagehat says
    February 16, 2012 at 9:32 am

    What a fascinating discussion! (And I had forgotten all about Eel’s prior mention of the word.)
    As for the spelling, I agree with those who find it unintuitive; as a matter of fact, I originally used “didicoy” for the title of this post, and used the -y spelling several times in the post despite the fact that my sole reference used “didicoi”—I had to reread the text with an eagle eye to make sure it was consistent before I posted it.
    In the interests of research, he is going to ask them next time he sees them what they think of the word ….
    Excellent; do let us know the response!

  21. Canapel says
    February 16, 2012 at 11:36 am

    I am studying the course of Intro to English Linguistics so this post is really interesting and helpful for me to enrich my vocab and expend my knowledge in language. I’ll remember this word “didicoi” as an example of pure British!

  22. Eel says
    February 16, 2012 at 2:54 pm

    @Peter
    @Tom
    I also grew up in the Fens on the Norfolk side living by the borders where the Fens spill over South Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Nearest cities (in reality glorified market towns) to me our Peterborough and Ely, nearest town is over the border in Cambridgeshire, Wisbech “Capital of The Fens” as well as some other ‘local’ epithets, I’m more of a Lynn man, y’see (King’s Lynn) – by the way, that’s Wisbech pronounced “wis-beach” not “wiz-bek”!

  23. Alan says
    February 16, 2012 at 4:47 pm

    My father lived in Kent up to about 1948. Even now, after more than 60 years in Australia, he still occasionally uses the term to refer to Gypsies. He never uses the words Rom or Romany. I don’t know how he would spell it. I have only heard him say it.

  24. marc says
    February 16, 2012 at 5:24 pm

    “unless it was just invented last week”
    Love it!

  25. bulbul says
    February 16, 2012 at 5:39 pm

    Yaron Matras’ Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language (Edinburgh University Press 2001) has the following to say:
    – Gypsy who is a different type to the speaker n. diddikai ER (= European Romani) akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’
    – half blood Gypsy n. diddikai ER akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’
    – rough Traveller n. diddikai ER akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’
    If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me, though I had the same reaction as Etienne. The only reference work I have on hand is Matras’ Romani: A Linguistic Introduction (CUP 2004), where he insists that “Apart from the various effects of palatalisation and palatal mutation, stops are generally stable in Romani” (p. 50).

  26. Sili says
    February 16, 2012 at 6:18 pm

    I used to enjoy MM, but I grew tired of the murders always continuing until noöne but the murderer was left standing.
    I gather the cast has been completely replaced by now, and the producer got in to hot water for deliberately leaving out various ethnicities from the cast. I have no idea if adding Roma is good or bad in that regard.

  27. AJP Crown says
    February 17, 2012 at 4:35 am

    My experience has been that no place name in Norfolk is pronounced the way it’s spelled, so unless I’m already aware of the pronunciation I find it’s best to avoid it. When I was a child I used to think there were two places: Haysborough, down the road, and Happisburgh, the place on the road signs.

  28. Paul says
    February 17, 2012 at 4:50 am

    AJP: But the sandbanks offshore are spelled Haisborough Sands (or Haisboro Sands or Haisbro Sands), according to Wiki. Presumably the mermaids couldn’t be bothered with the Happisburgh spelling…
    LH: There would be a puzzle for you. Why the disconnect on land and not at sea? Because it was important for mariners not to be confused about the sands, which are so dangerous they rate two lightvessels and a lighthouse on shore ?

  29. Michael Peverett says
    February 17, 2012 at 6:00 am

    Sili –
    Yes, in March 2011 the producer Brian True-May made some remarks in an interview (http://www.beehivecity.com/newspapers/exclusive-excerpt-from-midsomer-murders-racial-remark-row-interview-674325/) with the Radio Times about the show’s market appeal abroad as a vision of the steretypic English village. He had a reasonable point to make, initially , but soon lost his way and gave vent to ludicrously exaggerated remarks like “If you went into Slough [now] you wouldn’t see a white face amongst it” , devastating in such uncomfortable proximity to speaking of MM as a “last bastion of Englishness, and I want to keep it that way”. The ensuing storm forced him to step down. This traincrash interview provided xenophobic newspapers with an opportunity to report, and what’s worse, to drum up support for, a coarsened version (Midsomer Race Row: 99% of viewers insist the TV show should stay white – Daily Express); typical Daily Telegraph comments stream here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100079840/midsomer-murders-the-multiculturalist-media-cannot-force-black-people-to-live-in-villages-so-they-pretend-that-they-do-instead/ .
    Also, of course, an opportunity for more internationalist newspapers to make cutting remarks about the shallow cosiness of Middle England’s preferred viewing. It isn’t widely known that David Lawrence, one of the series’ authors, is David Harsent, one of the UK’s most admired poets, known for his corrosively powerful poems about, guess what, national mythology.

  30. AJP Crown says
    February 17, 2012 at 7:00 am

    “Norridge” and Norwich are the other two that I only learned later were the same place. Whereas Northwich in Cheshire is pronounced as it’s spelt, proving that I’m more likely to be confused in Norfolk.

  31. Eel says
    February 17, 2012 at 9:38 am

    @AJP:
    Norfolk’s full of odd places like that:
    Costessey – “Cossey”
    Dereham – “Deerum”
    Happisburgh – “Hazebrah”
    Narborough – “Narbrah”
    Ingoldisthorpe – “Inglesthorpe”
    Mautby – “Morby”
    Mundesley – “Munslee”
    Reepham – “Reefum”
    Worstead – “Woosted”
    Wymondham – “Windum”
    Great Yarmouth – “Yarmuf”
    It just makes things more interesting and confuses the London folk on the hunt for holiday homes and out-pricing the locals (gits!)

  32. dearieme says
    February 17, 2012 at 11:27 am

    Surely stereotypical English villages are permitted a Belgian exercising zee little grey cells?

  33. Rodger C says
    February 17, 2012 at 2:46 pm

    I was interested to note, from television a few years ago, that Rotherhithe is now pronounced as spelled (at least by Prince Edward). Swift spelled, and presumably pronounced, Gulliver’s hometown as “Redriff,” which always puzzled me as a boy because it wasn’t on any map.

  34. J.W. Brewer says
    February 17, 2012 at 3:04 pm

    I learned from I believe a prior LH thread that the Norwich/porridge rhyme I’d heard in a Robyn Hitchcock song was legit and not a mere exercise of poetic license. AJP’s claim about the opaqueness of all Norfolk place-name spellings reminds me of being in the Outer Hebrides coming on two decades ago when they’d just gotten some EU grant money to change all the place names on the road signs to the Gaelic spellings but the road maps commonly sold to tourists still had the now-superseded “English” spellings. (Many of the place names were originally Old Norse, of course, and the English spelling was arguably more faithful to the original than the Gaelic.)

  35. John Cowan says
    February 18, 2012 at 12:45 am

    The Man in the Moon rhyme (expanded by Tolkien into its “original” form, but not to be confused with his expansion of “Hey diddle diddle”) certainly rhymes Norwich and porridge. Art poetry may make off-rhymes for effect, but folk poetry does not. Far more likely for the rhyme to be lost altogether to sound-change.

  36. Paul says
    February 18, 2012 at 9:36 am

    Rotherhithe has been prounounced as spelled for at least 50 years to my knowledge. Wiki says:
    “In the past Rotherhithe was also known as Redriff or Redriffe,[3][4] however until the early 19th century, this name was applied to the whole river front from St Saviour’s Dock to Bull Head Dock.”
    I can’t find either name on current maps but it probably means the entire peninsula.
    I am trying to find out whether the Redriff usage was a variant pronounciation or, as the above seems to indicate, a different name for the area.

  37. Paul says
    February 18, 2012 at 9:39 am

    …pronunciation .. I always get that wrong…

  38. Maureen Brian says
    February 18, 2012 at 12:20 pm

    Paul,
    St Saviour’s Dock is at E end of Shad Thames – still there with one block named St Saviour’s Wharf; Bull Head Dock apparently – from Booth Poverty Map – just to the E of the entrance to Surrey Docks – now fancifully re-named Surrey Water fergawdsake! Now no sign of it!
    So not the whole Peninsula. St Saviour’s Dock is on the Rocque Map of 1746 but the other end of that stretch still farmland with a riverside road in mid C18.

  39. Harmonia says
    April 14, 2017 at 10:43 pm

    I’m surprised that no one has noted the similarity of this word to the
    first century Christian manual for converts (Roman pagans to Christianity)
    The Didache (pronounced “Did uh kay.”) That apparently means “training.”
    Hmmm.

  40. languagehat says
    April 15, 2017 at 9:04 am

    I’m surprised that you’re surprised, since there’s no conceivable connection between a first-century Christian manual for converts and a modern Romany term for travelers.

  41. David Marjanović says
    April 15, 2017 at 10:13 am

    Coincidences happen. The Persian word for “bad” sounds practically like the English one; in Mbabaram in northern Australia, “dog” sounds like in English; and I just learned that in Were, a language spoken in a village near the delta of the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, “boob” sounds just about like in English.

  42. kate aan de wiel says
    November 10, 2017 at 5:18 pm

    To go back to Didicoi, it was a descriptive term I heard as a child growing up in the depths of Somerset for the ‘Gippos ‘ who would appear at more or less regular intervals on the grass verges of the roads near Enmore where we lived. Funnily enough, we now have another encampment who’ve moved to a site next to Tulse Hill Station here in South London, next to my home…

  43. John says
    February 24, 2025 at 9:09 pm

    Random I’ve found this trying to prove to some one the real meaning of diddakia.

    So it means a true half blood…. there are very few real romany blood lines left

    Most are Irish or English travellers so there a completely different bread of people.

    Diddaki was used amoungest settled people as a slur…it was used by settled people to speak of raomni people who are to be trusted …..

    Travellers font like the word because most modern travellers hold little to none roamni hermitage and only think if you don’t wear a white vest and live on a council site your not a traveller but romani real diddis don’t need to live act talk like anyone its in are blood… if you look at a real romanichal hertiage there will be gorja even Irish mingled in and all the family look of non English nationality yet they’ve lived in England for years… we are seen as half bloods to roma people who have been settled in England for years like a Jamaican to a person who has been settled in England for 20years the skin tone changes….but a true romani will know other true romanis and that’s how your connected.. we also don’t tend to live on sites we live on are own land or yards or houses because we don’t fit with travellers we deal both them but we also don’t trust them we trust gorja people more…only people we trust are other diddis….

    So there you go I’ve cracked that mystery for you all.

    East anglia again… slot romani settled in east anglia flat lands easy to work… Kent only down road for fruit picking… there are a good population of settled roami living in east anglia if probably say more than half of the UK.

  44. Xerîb says
    February 28, 2025 at 5:48 am

    – Gypsy who is a different type to the speaker n. diddikai ER (= European Romani) akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’
    – half blood Gypsy n. diddikai ER akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’
    – rough Traveller n. diddikai ER akaj; dikh- ‘here’; ‘see’

    And exonyms are very often derived from frequent utterances in the group’s language: French “chtimi” to designate Picard speakers (from Picard “this…(to) me”) is an example that comes to mind.
    The above assumes, of course, that the term originally designated romany-speakers and only later came to designate other travellers and/or people of mixed descent.

    Etienne’s remark is very astute! It holds the promise of a way forward.

    I was interested in the details of the etymology of didicoy from ‘look here!’, but Matras does not seem to gather them together in any one place, and the 2020 OED revision of didicoy doesn’t have an discussions of the questions raised by the etymology. For LH readers who are curious, here is a summary of my notes on what I’ve found so far:

    (1) For Matras’ definition ‘Gypsy who is a different type to the speaker’, note his remarks in Appendix I (Lexicon of Angloromani) of Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language (2010), p. 176:

    The vocabulary is based on the corpus of recordings with speakers/users of Angloromani in England and Wales. All word forms have been retrieved directly from transcriptions of oral recordings of interviews, covering both English-to-Romani word elicitation (where speakers were asked for a Romani translation of English meanings) and free conversation. The vocabulary does not take into account material from published sources.

    No published source is given at the entry for the English meaning ‘Gypsy who is a different type to the speaker’ in the Angloromani dictionary of the Manchester Romani Project, so I suppose it derives from the corpus as Matras says.

    (2) The account of didicoy from ‘look here!’ seems to enter print with Bath Charles Smart and Henry Thomas Crofton (1875) The Dialect of the English Gypsies, p. 51 (available here):

    Akéi, adv., Here (’kei). Pasp., aká

    Dídakeis, or Dítakeis, n.pl., Half-bred Gypsies, who, instead of ‘dik-akei,’ say ‘did-, or dit-, akei’, for ‘look here’.

    (3) On this form of the imperative with did- or dit-, see John Sampson (1926) The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales. Page 119:

    § 269. -tā (-ta), -ba

    As suffixes of the emphatic Imperative with certain verbs -ta and -ba occur in W. Gyp. and some Cont. dialects.

    -tā̆, met with also in Rum., Hung., Bohm., and Germ. Gyp. is probably, as Mik[losich] conjectures, identical with the conj. tā ‘and’ (with positional de-aspiration), which Pott connects with Skr. atha ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘and’, ‘also’.

    Our examples are :—avitā́, avitā (pl. avénitā, ’venitā) ‘do come’, ‘come along’, ‘hasten’; dita! (=*dikʽta) ‘look!’ ‘see!’; šuntā ! ‘hearken’, ‘listen !’ We have also in the following an instance of -ta joined to an adverb in a construction with the optative particle me: me jal i rånī kanta ‘let the lady take herself off, then !’

    And further, page 186:

    § 381. The suffixes -tā̆ and -ba (see § 269) form emphatic Imperatives with a few verbs, e. g.: avitā, pl. ‘venitā ‘do thou (pl. ye) come’, dita (= *dikʽta) ‘look! see!’, šunta ‘hearken!’—Kerába = kēr + -ba ‘make haste!’ has the improperly formed pl. kerabén for *kenába.

    Note also for Angloromani, Matras (2010) Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language, p. 199:

    There is a trace of the emphatic imperative in *-tar in the exclamation shunta! ‘listen up!’ (Romani šun-tar!).

    Matras (2012) A Grammar of Domari, p. 104, also gives an emphatic marker -ta on the imperative in Domari.

    (4) Thomas Acton (1974) Gypsy Politics and Social Change: The Development of Ethnic Ideology and Pressure Politics among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to Romany Nationalism offers a speculative expansion of the explanation in Smart and Crofton that takes these morphological facts into account. I give a substantial chunk of his discussion of diddikai below. See especially the paragraph beginning ‘But the “half-breed” etymology is obviously not the truth’ and the subsequent paragraphs (boldface added):

    Rupert Croft-Cooke, who appears to accept fully the genetic-determinist account of what a ‘Didecai’ is, is put to great difficulty, in his account of several months in the company of one Ted Scamp, in trying to explain away why Ted, who is a ‘tatcho Romani’ and has a full Anglo- Romani vocabulary and knowledge of Gypsy customs, habitually referred to himself as a ‘Diddy’ (Croft-Cooke, 1948, p. vii)—a problem indeed for the man who could write ‘I believe I have a certain knack of perceiving in any people what is truly racial, and learning to love just that’ (op. cit., p. 2). He puts it down to modesty.

    And what are we to make of the song ‘I’m the Romani Rai’ (Acton, 1972a) which I have collected in various versions from almost all the Gypsy children I ever taught in Essex. The commonest versions of the first two lines ran either, ‘I’m the Romani Rai/I’m a true (real) didicai’ or ‘I’m the Romani Rai/Just an old didicai’—but once I heard, ‘They call me the Romani Rai, but I’m only an old didicai.’ When I mention alternative versions to Gypsies, they just say impatiently, ‘It’s the same song.’

    The ‘Diddicoy’ can even command a downright favourable image. For example, in the BBC Television documentary ‘Where do we go from here?’, there is the following passage spoken by Jim Riley immediately after his wife has just declared them to be ‘true Romany’ as opposed to ‘mumply’ Travellers:

    You see what we call a mumply, you see he understands nothing. You see he’s ignorant to it. He hasn’t got the knowledge to go and get a day’s work or to do a job of work-that’s what they call a mumply. And a hedgecrawler that is what we call a tramp Gypsy. He’s too idle to wash hisself. All that he wants is a fire, lay around a fire, eat and drink and smoke—that’s what they call the one I just said now, a hedge-crawler. But you see, when you hear someone say well there’s an old diddicoy that there is a true travelling bloke. He can turn his hand to anything. (Donellan, transcript, 1968, p. 6)

    Thus the word ‘Diddicai’ or ‘Didicoi’ is not just a term of abuse, but is used by some ordinary Gypsies to refer to themselves, and not by others. So, although there are now no clear lines of differentiation, the terms may have been, at some point in the past, a group label of some kind, a label based, moreover, on some linguistic difference.

    But the ‘half-breed’ etymology is obviously not the truth. Apart from the simple logical difficulties of founding an exactly half-breed group (what would happen in the third generation?), it is not easy to see how out marriage would have any simple regular effect on pronunciation. And in fact the pronunciation ‘Didecai’ or ‘Ditakei’, which Smart and Croften condemn, is not so absurd. Sampson (1926, p. 82) gives ‘Dita’ (contracted from ‘Dikta’) as the emphatic form of the imperative of ‘Dikava’, and all his examples in the text of his dictionary give this form, rather than ‘dik’. If conformity to the more archaic inflected forms is to be the test, ‘Dita’kai’ is better Romani than ‘Dik acai’—and certainly better Romani than the contracted exclamation now common in Essex and Kent ‘Dikai!!’

    People speak Romani with a different idiom or accent when they come from groups with slightly different dialects, as, say, from a different immigration, or when influenced by a different provincial English dialect, not because one of their parents was a Gaujo; in the latter case they simply speak with the accent of the Gypsy parent.

    An alternative, speculative theory might be that there was at some time some social division which happened to coincide with a difference of dialect, and that one side labelled the other by reference to their pronunciation of this popular exclamation. At first this might have been accepted in good spirit, as non- pejorative, or even complimentary by the other group. But suppose then that quarrels or dissension occurred in such a situation; ‘half-bred’ or ‘Gaujo’ are two of the first insults that would come to a Gypsy’s mind, especially where the quarrels concern things like the observance or non-observance of cultural taboos like mochadi avoidance.

    Under these circumstances one would expect the word ‘didicoi’ to serve, for the first group, as a scapegoat, when accusations are brought by Gaujos: ‘It’s not us that’s dirty, it’s the didicoys, degenerate half-breeds that they are.’ Gypsylorists, and then local authorities and landowners, might thus be fed with this unfavourable image; and the latter would have been able to put it to good use. On evictions they could claim that they were not suppressing the romantic ‘real Gypsy’, as popularised by Borrow; they were merely moving on the ‘didicais’. Such Gaujos might revisit Gypsies, and assuring them that they, too, were only against ‘didicais’, not ‘real Gypsies’, would reinforce the derogatory image, and spread it over a much wider range than the groups originally involved in the making of the distinction, at the same time removing it further from ethnic reality.

    But with the replacing of the anti-didicai animus of local authorities by the current anti-tinker animus (cf. Chapter 15), the number of contexts in which the word ‘didicai’ has a wholly pejorative connotation have declined, and so some older Gypsies reverted to using the word occasionally as a jocular synonym for ‘Traveller’, and Gypsy children sing, as their parents did, ‘I’m the Romani Rai, I’m a real didicai…’.

    (5) For lagniappe… Romany dita has been borrowed into colloquial Romanian as dita, ditai ‘look!’ ‘see!’ ‘there!’, developing further into an indeclinable prepositive adjective ditai ‘huge’.

  45. languagehat says
    February 28, 2025 at 1:51 pm

    Fascinating — thanks as always for your labors!

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