Kharia language

Not to be confused with Kharia Thar language.
Kharia
Region India (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Nepal
Native speakers
240,000  (2001 census)[1]
Austroasiatic
  • Munda

    • Kharia–Juang
      • Kharia
Language codes
ISO 639-3 khr
Glottolog khar1287[2]

The Kharia language (autonym: kʰaɽija or kʰeɽija[3]) is a Munda language that is primarily spoken by indigenous Kharia people of eastern India.

Classification

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.

The most widely cited classification places Kharia and Juang together as a subgroup of the South Munda branch of the Munda family. However, some earlier classification schemes placed Kharia and Juang together as an independent branch deriving from the root of the Munda languages, and named this branch Central Munda.

Kharia is in contact with Sadani (the local lingua franca), Mundari, Kurukh, Hindi, and Oriya (in Odisha) (Peterson 2008:434).

Distribution

Kharia speakers are located in the following districts of India (Peterson 2008:434).

References

  1. Kharia at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Kharia". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Peterson, John. 2008. "Kharia". In Anderson, Gregory D.S (ed). The Munda languages, 434-507. Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-32890-X.

External links