Sora language
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Sora is a south Munda language of the
Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The te ...
language of the
Sora people The Sora (alternative names and spellings include Saora, Saura, Savara and Sabara) are a Munda ethnic group from eastern India. They live in southern Odisha and north coastal Andhra Pradesh. The Soras mainly live in Gajapati, Rayagada and ...
, an ethnic group of eastern
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 ...
, mainly in the states of
Odisha Odisha (English: , ), formerly Orissa ( the official name until 2011), is an Indian state located in Eastern India. It is the 8th largest state by area, and the 11th largest by population. The state has the third largest population of ...
and
Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...
. Sora contains very little formal literature but has an abundance of folk tales and traditions. Most of the knowledge passed down from generation to generation is transmitted orally. Like many languages in eastern India, Sora is listed as 'vulnerable to extinction' by
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
. Sora speakers are concentrated in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. The language is endangered as per as
International Mother Language Institute International Mother Language Institute (IMLI) is statutory body in Bangladesh whose function is the preservation of languages. History Declaration of 21 February as the International Mother Language Day by the United Nations on 17 November 19 ...
(IMLI).


Distribution

Speakers are concentrated mainly in Ganjam District,
Gajapati District Gajapati district is a district of Odisha State in India. It was created from Ganjam District on 2 October, 1992. Gajapati district was named after Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deb, the King of the Paralakhemundi estate and the first Prime ...
(central Gumma Hills region (Gumma Block), etc.Anderson, Gregory D.S (ed). 2008. ''The Munda languages''. Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. .), and
Rayagada District Rayagada district is a district in southern Odisha, a state in India, which became a separate district in October 1992. Its population consists mainly of tribes, primarily the Khonds and the Soras. In addition to Odia, Kui and Sora are s ...
, but are also found in adjacent areas such as
Koraput Koraput is a town and a Municipality in Koraput district in the Indian state of Odisha. Koraput town is the district headquarter of Koraput district. History The district of Koraput derives its name from its headquarters the present town of ...
and
Phulbani Phulbani is a municipality and administrative headquarters of Kandhamal district in the state of Odisha in India. History It is named after the lady 'Phulardei' who was sacrificed by the local inhabitants as an act of religious ritual to Mother ...
districts; other communities exist in northern
Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...
(
Vizianagaram District Vizianagaram district is one of the six districts in the Uttarandhra region of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh with its headquarters located at Vizianagaram. The district was once the part of ancient Kalinga.Saripilli Dibbilingeswara temple ...
and
Srikakulam District Srikakulam district is one of the twenty-six districts of the States and union territories of India, Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, located in the Uttarandhra region of the state, with its headquarters located at Srikakulam. It is one of the si ...
).


History

The Sora language has faced a wavelike pattern of usage—that is, the number of people who speak Sora climbed steadily for decades before crashing down. In fact, the number of people who spoke Sora went from 157 thousand in 1901 to 166 thousand in 1911. In 1921, this number marginally rose to 168 thousand and kept climbing. In 1931, speaker numbers jumped to 194 thousand but in 1951, a period of exponential growth occurred, with speaker numbers jumping to 256 thousand. in 1961, numbers topped at 265 thousand speakers before crashing down in 1971 when speaker numbers dropped back down to 221 thousand.


Culture

Sora is spoken by the Sora people, who are a part of the Adivasi, or tribal people, in India, making Sora an Adivasi language. Sora is found in close proximity to Odia and Telugu speaking peoples making a great deal of Sora people bilingual. Sora does not have much in the way of literature except for a few songs and folk tales which are usually transmitted orally. Sora religion is a mix of traditional shamanistic rituals and the surrounding Hinduism predominant in surrounding populations. One particular Sora ritual has to do with death. Sora retains a unique shamanistic view on the subject of death. It is said that people who die from murders, suicides, or accidents are said to be taken, in a sense, by the Sun spirit. These people, called ''usungdaijen'', are then said to reside in the Sun itself after death. Sora uses spirits to explain many phenomena. For example, if a girl in no relationship has a headache or a migrane, it is said that the ''Pangalsum'' spirit, or Bachelor Spirit who contains the souls of men who have died before wedlock, has placed a wreath of flowers tightly around the girls head as a symbol of claiming her as his wife.


Phonology

On a similar note, our understanding of Sora phonology is limited at best but there are some generalizations that can be made. Most syllables are of the Consonant, Vowel, Consonant form and morphemes usually contain one to three syllables. There are 18 identifiable consonants and they fall into most of the established origins of sound. Five consonants originate from the palate while only one consonant originates from the glottis. An interesting facet of Sora
consonant 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 ...
s is that they contain an inherent ɘ vowel.Sora Sompeng. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2017, from http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail&key=Sora Although vowels may be pronounced differently, there exist only six vowels in Sora. There are no
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s and aspiration varies depending on the speaker. It is likely that the influence of English, Odia, and Telugu has also affected vowel pronunciation over the course of Sora's use. Pronunciations also change in prevocalic (occurring before a vowel) and non prevocalic environments.


Consonants


Vowels


Grammar

Sora uses grammatical devices, including subject and object agreement, word order, and noun compounding to show case. It is seen as a predominantly nominative-accusative language and once again differs from most other languages with its lack of a passive structure. However, just because Sora lacks a passive case does not mean other established forms of grammatical case are also missing. Rather, Sora has some complex grammatical cases. A few examples are as follows: *
Nominative In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...
*
Accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
* Locative *
Instrumental An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instru ...
*
Comitative In grammar, the comitative case (; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role (other uses of "with", l ...
*
Benefactive The benefactive case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used where English would use "for", "for the benefit of", or "intended for", e.g. "She opened the door ''for Tom''" or "This book is ''for Bob''" ...
*
Genitive In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
In addition, Sora, like many other Munda languages, uses relator nouns to link nouns with the other parts of the sentence in order to provide a more specific meaning, called compounding. These monosyllabic nouns that enhance meaning are called Semantic relator nouns and are used widely in Sora. Sora also has a combining form for every noun in addition to the full form of the noun. The combining form allows the noun to be attached to a verb root to create a more semantically complex word, similar to compounding in other languages. Sora contains prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to form its affixation but only uses its suffixes to change the possession of nouns. The combining form is the form seen when the noun is being used with a verb or another full formed noun. The full form is the form seen when the noun is standing alone or functioning not in tandem with other parts of speech. Some templates of Sora combinations between nouns and verbs are as follows: Verb + Combined Form Verb + Combined Form + Combined Form Full Form + Combined Form Full Form + Combined Form + Combined Form An example of a Full Form noun shortened into the Combined Form is as follows: ''mənra,'' the Full Form of man, transform into the combined form word --''mər'' . The two—indicate that a Noun (Full or Combined) or Verb has to precede the Combined Form noun; that is the Combined Form Noun can not stand on its own. Although by no means conclusive, a few general guidelines about the Combined Form is that it depends on where the combination with the verb or other noun is to take place. If the combined form is to an infix, then its resulting form will be different from if it were to be combined as a prefix. Some examples of Full Form Nouns and their Combined Forms are as follows: Full Form Combined Form English Translation ədɘ'ŋ --dɘ'ŋ honeycomb ərɘ'ŋ --rɘ'ŋ sour bɘ'nra'j --bɘn flour ba'ra' --bal gun barrel kəṛíŋ—diŋ drum


Vocabulary

Sora borrows words from surrounding languages like Telugu and Oriya. An example of a word borrowed from Oriya is ''kɘ'ra'ñja''' which is a tree name. From Telugu ''mu'nu, which means black gram, is borrowed. Moreover, within the Munda family itself most words appear to be mutually intelligible owing to minor differences in pronunciations and phonology. Kharia and Korku, two other Munda languages, share mutually intelligible words with Sora. For example, the number 11 in Kharia is ''ghol moŋ,'' in Korku it is ''gel ḑo miya,'' and in Sora it is ''gelmuy.'' Each 11 in each language looks and sounds remarkably similar to the other 11's. This phenomenon is not just contained in numbers but rather a great deal of vocabulary is mutually intelligible among the Munda languages. Within the Austroasiatic language family more knowledge about Sora vocabulary can be found. The
Mon-Khmer The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...
language family which encompasses the languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia has lexical
cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...
s with the Munda family. That means that some words found in Sora are of direct proto-Austroasiatic origin and share similarities with other derived Austroasiatic language families. Words that relate to the body, family, home, field, as well as pronouns, demonstratives, and numerals are the ones with the most cognates.


Numerals

The Sora
numeral system A numeral system (or system of numeration) is a writing system for expressing numbers; that is, a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using Numerical digit, digits or other symbols in a consistent manner. The same s ...
uses a base 12, which only a few other languages in the world do. Ekari, for example, uses a base 60 system. For example, 39 in Sora
arithmetic Arithmetic () is an elementary part of mathematics that consists of the study of the properties of the traditional operations on numbers— addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and extraction of roots. In the 19th ...
would be thought of as (1 * 20)+ 12 + 7. Here are the first 12 numerals in the Sora language : English: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve ''Sora: aboy bago yagi unji monloy tudru gulji thamji tinji gelji gelmuy migel'' Similar to how English uses the suffix from the numeral ''ten'' after ''twelve'' (such as ''thirteen, fourteen,'' etc.), Sora also uses a suffix assignment to numerals after 12 and before 20. Thirteen in Sora is expressed as ''migelboy'' (12+1), fourteen as ''migelbagu'' (12+2), etc. Between numerals 20 and 99, Sora adds the suffix ''kuri'' to the first constituent of the numeral. For example, 31 is expressed as ''bokuri gelmuy'' and 90 as unjikuri gelji. The Sora number system was featured in a puzzle by
Lera Boroditsky Lera Boroditsky (born c.1976) is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of ...
, found in the More Resources section associated with he
"TED talk"


Writing system

The Sora language has multiple writing systems. One is called Sora Sompeng, a native writing system created only for the Sora language. It was developed in 1936 by Mangei Gomango. Sora is also written in the Odia alphabet by the bilingual speakers of Odisha. Similarly, Telugu is used by the bilingual speakers living in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Finally, the last commonly used script to write Sora is the Latin script.


Media coverage

Sora was one of the subjects of
Ironbound Films Ironbound Films is an American independent documentary film production company. Their films focus on stories of how people succeed and fail to connect. Their 2008 film ''The Linguists'' and 2010 film ''The New Recruits'', were about characters wh ...
' 2008 American documentary film ''
The Linguists ''The Linguists'' is an independent 2008 American documentary film produced by Ironbound Films about language extinction and language documentation. It follows two linguists, Greg Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languag ...
'', in which two linguists attempted to
document A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" or ...
several
moribund language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
s.


Further reading

*Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016)
"Sora"
'' Glottolog 2.7''. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. *Ramamurti, R. S. (1931). ''A Manual of the Sora (Savara) Language. Delhi: Mittal Publication.'' *Veṅkaṭarāmamūrti, G. (1986). ''Sora–English dictionary''. Delhi: Mittal Publication.


References


External links


Austroasiatic Languages: Munda and Mon–Khmer
{{Austro-Asiatic languages Munda languages Endangered languages of India