Jan Kochanowski has left a solid legacy of well-researched books, in French and English, on Gypsy studies, a field of which he had more first-hand knowledge than most.

He did not seem destined for a life of scholarship. Born into a Romany tribe of the Gila, Stanga and Frundze clans living in tents on the forested outskirts of Cracow, Poland, in 1920, he wandered as a toddler with his large family through the Soviet states of northeastern Europe, and became versed in the Gypsy skills of survival. It was just as well: by his twenties, he was in Latvia in the midst of the German invasion, and in and out of the hands of the Nazis, several times escaping from slave-labour units and narrowly avoiding extermination.

Many of his tribe were gassed in a synagogue to which they had fled; others died when the Germans set fire to the hangar where they had sought refuge. When other Gypsies were being marshalled for a last trip to the woods to be machinegunned, a German commander held Kochanowski back, saying: “Not the kid.”

His brothers and sisters were not so lucky. They fell victim to the genocide that swamped Gypsies as well as Jews. His father joined the Soviet forces and died as a commander in the Red Army during fighting at Smolensk in 1942.

Several years before, Kochanowski had enrolled on a course of study in Riga. One afternoon a message came from his mother to quit school immediately because the Nazis were waiting to arrest him. She had managed to find a hiding place, its location unknown to him, but he knew that he had to flee Latvia.

Kochanowski made his way slowly to France where, he had learnt, German authority was crumbling. In Paris in 1944, however, he was taken by the Germans and placed with 100 or so Latvians in Beauregard camp in the suburbs. Again, he escaped, and in January 1945 he joined the Polish Forces under British command.

Kochanowski’s fluency with Polish, Baltic languages and Russian drew him to the attention of British Intelligence, but he declined an offer to work as a spy in postwar Europe. He was proud enough to have won a service medal and wanted to settle in France. He was a poor refugee with no prospects, until he fell in love with Elisabeth Morel, the daughter of an industrialist. After their wedding in Paris in 1950, they moved into a large house, even though the marriage of an haute-bourgeoise to a Gypsy was considered scandalous.

There were other pressures on the marriage. Kochanowski was unable to find regular employment, instead spending much of his time studying at the University of Paris. Some money came in from theatreland. He had been a good dancer and singer since childhood, so the Troupe Bohémien was happy to hire him – but not to pay him as well as his popularity with audiences deserved.

His wife noticed, too, that he was still racked by the guilt of being one of only two members of his family to survive the Nazi terror. In 1960, by when two sons and a daughter had been born, he left the family. He had a PhD in linguistics from the Sorbonne, and a determination to campaign for Romanies, as well as to write about them.

This did not go well. Rival scholars were challenging his Gypsy credentials. His mother had to be summoned to Paris from Riga to converse with him, in their dialect of Romany, about their customs, in front of a jury of academics. Hoping he had quashed the rumours that he was a phoney, Kochanowski set up his own association, Romani Yekhipe (Gypsies Together).

Despite its tiny budget, it became influential. In France it played a leading role in ending the requirement for Gypsies to carry a card specifying personal physical details.

Kochanowski was a regular participant in international Romany conferences, where he promoted his somewhat controversial linguistic theories about the reasons for the westward migration of his people apparently from north India centuries ago. Under his Polish name, and sometimes under his Romany patronym of Gila, he published much about Romany and its dialects, including one of the first instruction books, Parlons Romani. His work was well regarded but, to his lasting regret, it never led to an academic appointment.

Kochanowski saw assimilation as cultural death for Gypsies and urged them to be proud of their ethnicity. He would tell Saster, his oldest son, always “to love nature and respect everybody, to dance, to sing . . . to make love with love”.

A paradox is that his own children became fully assimilated with the non-Gypsy world. Partly because he had little to do with their upbringing, they did not learn much of his ancestral tradition and mother tongue.

His daughter died at the age of 25, and of his surviving children, one son became the director of the national ballet in Gabon, the other a general in the French Air Force. His wife also survives him. At his funeral in Beauvais, his coffin was draped in the Romany flag.

Jan Kochanowski (Vania de Gila), Romany scholar, was born on August 6, 1920. He died of pancreatic cancer on May 18, 2007, aged 86