Rawat (Raute), or "Jangali" (

Jungle A jungle is land covered with dense forest and tangled vegetation, usually in tropical climates. Application of the term has varied greatly during the past recent century. Etymology The word ''jungle'' originates from the Sanskrit word ''jaṅ ...

), is a small

Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

language of

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. It is spoken in 9 villages north of

Askot Askot or Askote ( Kumaoni:असकोट) is a small Himalayan town in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand in India. It is the part of Kanalichhina development Block and Didihat Tehsil. The place is also famous for the Askot Musk Deer Sanct ...

Pithoragarh district Pithoragarh district is the easternmost district in the state of Uttarakhand. It is located in the Himalayas and has an area of and a population of 483,439 (as of 2011). The city of Pithoragarh, located in Saur Valley, is its headquarters. T ...

Uttarakhand Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; the official name until 2007), is a state in the northern part of India. It is often referred to as the "Devbhumi" (literally 'Land of the Gods') due to its religious significance and ...

(''

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'') as well as in several villages in Dadeldhura District, Nepal and Darchula District, Nepal. Rawat (pronounced "raut") is a semi-agglutinative language, and features SOV sentences with either monosyllabic or less frequently di-syllabic noun heads and verb stems. Verbs are modified with various particles, including nominalizers, causatives, tense, aspect, person, number and other generally stem final particles. The noun heads have plurals, locatives, deictics, ergatives, reflexives and other generally word-final case markings. Prefixed morphemes similar to adjectives also modify nouns and root-initial voiced/voiceless alternations signal the transitivity of verbs. An example is ''geda hluw hwã-ha-re'' (geda=child hluw=bathe hwã=Copula ha=progressive re=present tense) "The child is bathing" (Fortier 2019:139). ''Ethnologue'' (2013) reports that Rawat has borrowed recent loanwords from local

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

for terms for modern semantic domains (modern house types for example). The exonyms "Rawat", "Raute", and "Raji" all may derive from Indic words referring to "Kings (of the forest)". The people's endonym, name for themselves, is Bat-Tou (in Pithoragarh, India) and Bot-Tho (in Champawat, India) and Bot-Tou (in Dadeldhura, Nepal). The language Rawat is called Bat-Kha among communities in the Pithoragarh region and Bot-Kha in the Champawat region of Uttarakhand. It is classified by linguists as Rawat (ISO 639-3 jnl; Glottocode Rawa1264). It is in the same language sub-group with the languages named Raji spoken in Nepal (ISO 639-3 rji; Glottocode Raji1240) and Raute (ISO 639-3 rau; Glottocode Raut1239) which is also spoken in Nepal. The three languages are currently classified in their own Sino-Tibetan language sub-group called Raji-Raute. This language sub-group shows some affinity to areal Mahakiranti group Himalayish languages such as Kham Magar and Magar Dhut.

References

Raji–Raute languages Languages of Uttarakhand Endangered languages of India {{SinoTibetan-lang-stub