That Rroma have and Indian based language, a discovery of 1753 is symptomatic of a general non-recognition among the general public that Rroma have their own language. True, until recently, Rroma themselves were not exactly co-operative and some are even to this day reluctant to tell Gadje about their language. Since then, numerous studies have been published and quite an amount of research has been done. The picture one gets from these books, dictionaries or articles is, however fragmented - a snap-shot of a particular Rroma group, even often only one person or one family in a given country and at a given time.
This has led many,among them alas also Rroma, to say that the Rroma, in fact almost each group, has its own dialect, which is largely unintelligible to other Rroma. This atomisation of language is a myth. While it is true that there are different Rroma dialects, they are all based on a common basis, what we call the common trunk of Rromanes. This part, found in all variants is the basis on which one can decree that Rromanes is a language.
Rromanes, contrary to some other languages, is not static, it evolves everyday, with the interaction with non-Rromanes speakers, with everyday life.
The Rroma have no "Académie Française", an institute which one can sometimes qualify as being devoted to defending the French language against "pernicious" foreign influences. But Rromanes has an extremely good memory of what is "foreign" and what is Rromanes. Even for words acquired during the Greek period of their history and of course for later ones, in many Rroma dialects, one finds a memory of the acquired nature of these words - in the grammatical forms of plural. Which language can claim such a similar behaviour?