Social:Bharia language

From HandWiki
Short description: Dravidian language
Bharia
Native toIndia
RegionMadhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal
EthnicityBharia
Native speakers
(197,000 cited 1981 census)[1]
Dravidian
  • (unclassified)
    • Bharia
Devanagari
Language codes
ISO 639-3bha
Glottologbhar1241[2]

Bharia is an unclassified Dravidian language spoken in the remote Patalkot Valley of Madhya Pradesh in central India.

It is not clear if the Bharia people of the 1981 census figure, who were spread out over several states outside the Patalkot Valley, all speak the Dravidian Bharia language, or a form of Hindi.

Bharia is not well-enough known to be classified within Dravidian. There are several Gondi languages spoken in the area, but the Bharia language is said to "differ totally" from Gondi.[3]

The language is critically endangered.[4]

References

  1. Bharia at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds (2017). "Bharia". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/bhar1241. 
  3. C. Scanlan (1872) "Notes on the Bharias", The Indian Antiquary, vol. 1, pp 157 ff.
  4. "How modernisation deleted endangered tribes dialect". https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/how-modernisation-deleted-endangered-tribes-dialect/1605396.