Palpa was the name of a purported language or dialect of western Nepal, apparently associated with Palpa District. A version of the New Testament was published in this language by the Serampore Mission Press in 1827. In a 1916 volume of the Linguistic Survey of India,

G.A. Grierson Sir George Abraham Grierson (7 January 1851 – 9 March 1941) was an Irish administrator and linguist in British India. He worked in the Indian Civil Service but an interest in philology and linguistics led him to pursue studies in the languag ...

reproduced an extract of this text, with a one-page description of its grammar "more as a curiosity than as evidence of an existing form of speech", as it had been "impossible to check its correctness" due to the absence of other specimens. He considers the language of this text to be a form of

Nepali Nepali or Nepalese may refer to : Concerning Nepal * Anything of, from, or related to Nepal * Nepali people, citizens of Nepal * Nepali language, an Indo-Aryan language found in Nepal, the current official national language and a language spoken ...

, but with some similarities to the Kumaoni spoken to the west in India. Palpa had an ISO 639-3 language code, ''plp'', until it was retired in 2020 because of the continued absence of evidence for the existence of a separate language entity. It is not to be confused with the Palpa dialect of the Sino-Tibetan Western Magar language, also spoken in this area.

References

{{Nepali language Spurious languages Nepali language