Santali Language

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Santali is a Kherwarian Munda language spoken natively by the Santal people of South Asia. It is the most widely-spoken language of the Munda subfamily of the Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal. It is one of the constitutionally scheduled official languages of the Indian Republic and the additional official language of Jharkhand and West Bengal per the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is spoken by around 7.6 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer.

Santali is characterised by a split into at least a northern and southern dialect sphere, with slightly different sets of phonemes: Southern Santali has six phonemic vowels, in contrast with eight or nine in Northern Santali, different lexical items, and to a certain degree, variable morphology. Santali is recognised by linguists as being phonologically conservative within the Munda branch. Unlike many Munda languages that had their vowel systems restructured and shrunk to five such as Mundari, Ho, and Kharia, Santali retains a larger vowel system of eight phonemic cardinal vowels, which is very unusual in the South Asian linguistic area. The language also uses vowel harmony processes in morphology and expressives similar to Ho and Mundari. Morphosyntactically, Santali, together with Sora, are considered less restructured than other Munda languages, having less influence from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Clause structure is topic-prominent by default.

Santali is primarily written in Ol Chiki script, an indigenous alphabetic writing system developed in 1925 by Santal writer Raghunath Murmu. Additionally, it is also written in various regional Indian writing systems such as Bengali-Assamese script, Odia script, Devanagari, and the Santali Latin alphabet.

According to linguist Paul Sidwell, proto-Munda language speakers ancestral of Santali probably arrived on the coast of Odisha from Indochina about 4000–3500 years ago, and spread before the Indo-Aryan migration to the Chota Nagpur Plateau and adjacent areas.

  1. Wikipedia
  2. PIB

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