The indigenous Norwegian Travellers are an ethnic minority group in Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

. 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

Eilert Sundt

Eilert Sundt was a Norwegian sociologist, known for his work on mortality, marriage and other subjects among the working class....

, 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.

Language

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

Rodi language

Rodi, also known by the ambiguous term Traveller Norwegian, is a language spoken by the indigenous Norwegian Travellers in Norway. It is an offshoot of Norwegian with significant influence of Sinti, Rotwelsch and, especially in recent decades, Scandoromani...

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