| Gondi | |
|---|---|
| Gōndi | |
| Spoken in | India |
| Ethnicity | Gondi people |
| Native speakers | 2 million (date missing) |
| Language family |
Dravidian
|
| Writing system | Devanagari script, Telugu script, Gondi script |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | gon |
| ISO 639-3 | gon – Macrolanguage individual codes: ggo – Southern Gondi gno – Northern Gondi |
Gondi (Gōndi) is spoken by the Gondi people. It is a Central-Dravidian language, spoken by about two million people[1] – chiefly in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattishgarh and in various adjoining areas of neighbouring states. 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.
Contents |
Gondi is typically written in the Devanagari script or Telugu script but actually has its own writing system, the Gondi script, which was designed by a Gond in 1928. Most Gonds are illiterate, and do not use any script, however some adopt the Devanagari or Telugu scripts as their own and the Gonds’ own script is being used far less than before[2]
|
|||||||||||||||||