Kharia language
Kharia language
Main page
1946009

Kharia language

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Kharia language

The Kharia language (Kharia pronunciation: [kʰaɽija] or [kʰeɽija]) is a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family, that is primarily spoken by the Kharia people of eastern India.

The first systematic description of the Kharia language is Banerjee (1894)'s Kharia grammar, followed by Tea Districts Labour Association (1929) and Floor et al. (1934), which resulted in a Kharia-English Dictionary. An ethnological study on the tribe was published in 1937 by Roy & Roy.

The first major academic approach to Kharia were taken by linguist Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow in the 1950s and 1960s with studies published in both German and English. Other works include Biligiri (1965)'s full study and lexicon; Mahapatra (1976) on Kharia and Juang verbs, Malhotra (1982) Ph.D. dissertation attempting a comprehensive grammar of Kharia; Abbi (1993; 1997) on language change and contact; Rehberg (2003) on Kharia phonology (in German).

Kharia belongs to the Kharia–Juang branch of the Munda language family. Its closest extant relative is the Juang language, but the relationship between Kharia and Juang is remote.

Kharia is in contact with Sadri (the local lingua franca), Mundari, Kurukh, Hindi, and Odia (in Odisha).

Kharia speakers are located in the following districts of India.

Gemination only occur in morpheme boundaries of words. Consonant length can be phonemic. Eg. /oton=na/ realized as [ɔtɔnːɑ] (press=INF). /ʔ/, /s/, and /h/ may not be geminated.

Kharia NPs has three cases:

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.