Hijra Farsi is a secret language spoken by South-Asian

hijra Hijra, Hijrah, Hegira, Hejira, Hijrat or Hijri may refer to: Islam * Hijrah (often written as ''Hejira'' in older texts), the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE * Migration to Abyssinia or First Hegira, of Muhammad's followers ...

and koti communities. Hijras are a marginalized

transgender A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through tr ...

community that lives in sequestered groups in many cities of India and Pakistan. The language, also known as ''Koti Farsi'', is spoken by the hijra community throughout Pakistan, Bangladesh and North India. The language is based on Hindustani and not

Farsi Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken an ...

, as suggested by the name. The sentence structure is similar to

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
''

Sheeraz, Muhammad, and Ayaz Afsar. "Farsi: An Invisible But Loaded Weapon for the Emerging Hijraism in Pakistan." Kashmir Journal of Language Research 14, no. 2 (2011). Hijra Farsi is mainly spoken by Muslim Hijras; Hindu Hijras speak the Gupti language and its regional dialects. Even though the language is not actually based on Persian (Farsi), the hijras consider the language to be related to the language of the

Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...

, which they associate with the origin of hijra identity. Hijra Farsi is most similar to Hindi, but is not intelligible to Hindi speakers due to distinctive intonation and a large amount of distinctive vocabulary. After the partition of India, the language has come to include words of local languages including Punjabi, Saraiki, Sindhi and other languages.

History

Hijra Farsi has no documented history, but linguist and anthropologist

Kira Hall Kira Hall (born 1962, Birmingham, Alabama) is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP), at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The majority of Hall's wor ...

has found indications of its existence from the early 1800s. Hijras enjoyed a high status during the Mughal empire, which may be the reason why the language is named after 'Farsi' despite its dissimilarity with Persian. With the fall of the Mughal empire and start of British colonial rule, eunuchs were pushed into a more marginalized position. Colonial laws criminalized their choice of dress, as well as the public dancing they regularly engaged in. The crackdown caused hijras to become protective of their language, which then evolved into a survival tool. That the language is still in use may have to do with the fact that the community continues to be persecuted in independent India. "Seventy-four percent of the Hijra community has suffered violence and harassment,” says Simran Shaikh, who works with Alliance India, an NGO that works on AIDS prevention.

Community-building tool

Hijra Farsi began and has continued as a learned, as opposed to a mother, tongue. The language is introduced to newcomers when they enter the hijra community, together with the group’s alternative family structure, cultural norms, and other traditions. Having a language that creates a sense of a community is a necessity for hijras, who typically give up a great deal when they join the community. Hijras see the language as something that is truly theirs, and speak about it with pride.

Examples

The following examples are adapted from Awan & Sheeraz (2011), who researched Hijra Farsi in the communities within

Dera Ghazi Khan Dera Ghazi Khan (), abbreviated as D.G. Khan, is a city in the southwestern part of Punjab, Pakistan. It is the 19th largest city of Pakistan by population. Lying west of the Indus River, it is the headquarters of Dera Ghazi Khan District and ...

and

Rawalpindi Rawalpindi ( or ; Urdu, ) is a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan. It is the fourth largest city in Pakistan after Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad, and third largest in Punjab after Lahore and Faisalabad. Rawalpindi is next to Pakistan's ...

. Note that the transcriptions are taken directly from the text, which does not specify a distinction between

retroflex A retroflex ( /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal ( /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the ha ...

and dental plosives, nor does it consistently mark a distinction between /ɐ/ and /ɑ/. They do, however, mention that /ɽ/ is a very common sound used in Hijra Farsi, especially compared to its frequency in other languages in contact.

Nouns

:This refers to the

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...

of the noun in Hijra Farsi Many of these words are completely dissimilar to any of the locally spoken languages, but the pluralization strategies remain identical to those of

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
''

Function words

In addition to

content words Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actio ...

, Hijra Farsi demonstrates innovation (i.e. divergence from related languages) in some

function words In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...

. Namely, in

Lucknow Lucknow (, ) is the capital and the largest city of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and it is also the second largest urban agglomeration in Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous district and division ...

, Nagar (2008) found the pronouns ''humsio'' ("I", 1st person), ''tumsio'' ("you", 2nd person), and ''ojo'' ("he/she", 3rd person), and the augmentative ''adiyal'' ("very"). The

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

of these pronouns is unclear in Nagar's thesis. In Rawalpindi and Dera Ghazi Khan, Awan and Sheeraz found ''hamala'' to be the 1st person pronoun, with ''tamala'' as the 2nd person. In addition to pronouns, there is innovation in

demonstratives Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning ...

: unlike surrounding languages, there is no proximal/distal distinction, and unlike surrounding languages, there ''is'' a gender distinction: ''insa'' for masculine and ''insi'' for feminine, both using productive plural morphology such that masculine "these" will be ''inse'' and feminine "these" will be ''insian'' (as transcribed by Awan & Sheeraz).

Numbers

Hijra Farsi's counting system, used specifically for counting money, uses lexemes unique to the cant: : Awan & Sheeraz list this number as one hundred thousand, and Kundalia lists it as ten thousand.