The Bazigar, Goaar, or Guar, language is spoken by the Bazigar ethnic group of north-western India who are found primarily in

Punjab Punjab (; ; also romanised as Panjāb or Panj-Āb) is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia. It is located in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising areas of modern-day eastern Pakistan and no ...

, but also in

Haryana Haryana () is a States and union territories of India, state located in the northern part of India. It was carved out after the linguistic reorganisation of Punjab, India, Punjab on 1 November 1966. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with les ...

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh ( ; UP) is a States and union territories of India, state in North India, northern India. With over 241 million inhabitants, it is the List of states and union territories of India by population, most populated state in In ...

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...

Chandigarh Chandigarh is a city and union territory in northern India, serving as the shared capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana. Situated near the foothills of the Shivalik range of Himalayas, it borders Haryana to the east and Punjab in the ...

Himachal Pradesh Himachal Pradesh (; Sanskrit: ''himācāl prādes;'' "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a States and union territories of India, state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen Indian Himalayan ...

, Jammu and Kashmir and

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; Literal translation, lit. 'Land of Kings') is a States and union territories of India, state in northwestern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the List of states and union territories of ...

. It is apparently 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 2024, there are more than 1.5 billion speakers, primarily concentrated east of the Indus river in Ba ...

(

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

) while

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...

has labelled it "unclassifiable". Schreffler argues that it compares well with the Western Rajasthani dialects as well as with Punjabi (with which it is not mutually intelligible), while Deb notes its resemblance to Bagri. Ethnologue formerly classified it as a

Dravidian language The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (i ...

Background

Initially nomadic and with a traditional occupation involving acrobatics and performance arts, they are now largely settled and mostly engaged in agricultural and other forms of labour. Several of the major Bazigar groups currently found in Indian Punjab migrated at the time of Partition in 1947 from Western Punjab (now in Pakistan), where they had started settling earlier in the century. The ethnic Bazigar are estimated at half a million in Punjab, but the language is not spoken by all. The younger generation are shifting to the regional languages, for example Schreffler reports that people younger than 30 prefer to use the regional language with one another, and speak Bazigar only with older people. The language is also known as ''Guar boli'', or ''goāroṅ ri bolī'' "Guars' speech", after the name that the community uses for itself. Bazigar has no written literature. Additionally, the Bazigar have an artificial secret language which they use when they do not want to be understood by outsiders. They call it ''Parsi'' or ''Pashto'' (not to be confused with the

Farsi Persian ( ), also known by its endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), 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 spoke ...

and

Pashto Pashto ( , ; , ) is an eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family, natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. It has official status in Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyb ...

languages).

Linguistic characteristics

Bazigar has an almost identical phonology to Punjabi except for the presence of the voiceless palatal fricative and the absence of the

voiceless glottal fricative The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition or the aspirate, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant '' phonologically'', but often lacks the ...

. Words with initial in Punjabi correspond to words with a tone in Bazigar. There are differences from Punjabi in the vocabulary and the morphology, notably in the absence of a vowel feminine ending (e.g. 'old woman'), and there are similarities to Hindi and Western Rajasthani, for example the

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 ...

marker and the

dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...

Background

Linguistic characteristics

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading