Mewati (Devanagri:मेवाती; Perso-Arabic:میواتی) is an

Indo-Aryan language The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...

spoken by about three million speakers in the Mewat Region (

Alwar Alwar (Pronunciation: �lʋəɾ is a city located in India's National Capital Region and the administrative headquarters of Alwar District in the state of Rajasthan. It is located 150 km south of Delhi and 150 km north of Jaipur. ...

and Bharatpur, districts of

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern s ...

Nuh district Nuh district (formerly known as Mewat district) is one of the 22 districts in the Indian state of Haryana. There are four sub-divisions in this district: Nuh, Ferozepur Jhirka, Punahana, and Taoru. It has an area of and had a population of 1. ...

Haryana Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land a ...

). While other people groups in the region also speak the Mewati language, it is one of the defining characteristics of the Meo culture. There are 9

vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

, 31

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...

, and two

diphthongs A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

. Suprasegmentals are not so prominent as they are in the other

dialects of Rajasthani Rajasthani (Devanagari: ) refers to a group of Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken primarily in the state of Rajasthan and adjacent areas of Haryana, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh in India. There are also speakers in the Pakistani provinces ...

. There are two numbers—singular and plural, two genders—masculine and feminine; and three cases—direct, oblique, and vocative. The nouns decline according to their final segments.

Case marking A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomina ...

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

al.

Pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...

s are traditional in nature and are inflected for number and case. Gender is not distinguished in pronouns. There are two types of

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

s. There are three tenses: past, present, and future.

Participles In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...

function as adjectives.

Phonology

There are twenty plosives at five places of articulation, each being tenuis, aspirated,

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

, and murmured: . Nasals and laterals may also be murmured, and there is a voiceless and a murmured .

References

{{Authority control Western Indo-Aryan languages Mewat Rajasthani languages

Phonology

See also

References