Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish word chaval, meaning not ‘a pikey’ but ‘a bloke’, comes from the same source. And so it does, I find on inquiry.
Corominas’s six-volume Spanish etymological dictionary confirms this, though it quotes among its supplementary authorities George Borrow. Now Borrow was a brave linguist, but he was neither exact nor comprehensive in his linguistic analyses of Romany. In any case, the Spanish took to their hearts this Gitano word chaval. The people of Barcelona use the form xava (the initial x merely having the value of ch, as in cheese).
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