Gondi language

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Gondi
Spoken in:	India
Total speakers:	2 million
Language family:	Dravidian  Gondi
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	to be added
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	variously: gon — Gondi (generic) ggo — Southern Gondi gno — Northern Gondi
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Gondi is spoken by the Gondi people. It is one of the most important Central Dravidian languages, spoken by about two million people--chiefly in Madhya Pradesh state, India. Although it is the language of the Gond people, only about half of them still speak it.

Gondi has no written literature, but it has a rich folk literature, examples of which are marriage songs and narrations. The language has a two-gender system, substantives being either masculine or nonmasculine. Gondi departed from the parent Proto-Dravidian language by developing initial voiced stops (g, j, ḍ, d, b) and aspirated stops (kh, gh, jh, dh, ph).

Most of the Gondi dialects are still inadequately recorded and described. The more important dialects are Dorla, Koya, Maria, Muria, and Raj Gond. Some basic phonologic features separate the northwestern dialects from the southeastern. One is the treatment of the original initial s, which is preserved in northern and western Gondi, while farther to the south and east it has been changed to h; in some other dialects it has been lost completely. Other dialectal variations in the Gondi language are the alteration of initial r with initial l and a change of e and o to a.