Santali (,

Ol Chiki The Ol Chiki () script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ (Santali: ''ol'' 'writing', ''chemet'' 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santali alphabet invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in the year 1925, is the official writing system for San ...

: ), Bengali: , Odia: , Devanagari: , also known as Santal, is the most widely spoken language of the Munda subfamily of the

Austroasiatic languages 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 ...

, related to Ho and Mundari, spoken mainly in the Indian states of

Assam Assam (; ) is a state in northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . The state is bordered by Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh to the north; Nagaland and Manipur ...

Bihar Bihar (; ) is a state in eastern India. It is the 2nd largest state by population in 2019, 12th largest by area of , and 14th largest by GDP in 2021. Bihar borders Uttar Pradesh to its west, Nepal to the north, the northern part of West ...

Jharkhand Jharkhand (; ; ) is a state in eastern India. The state shares its border with the states of West Bengal to the east, Chhattisgarh to the west, Uttar Pradesh to the northwest, Bihar to the north and Odisha to the south. It has an area of . ...

, Mizoram,

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 Sc ...

Tripura Tripura (, Bengali: ) is a state in Northeast India. The third-smallest state in the country, it covers ; and the seventh-least populous state with a population of 36.71 lakh ( 3.67 million). It is bordered by Assam and Mizoram to the eas ...

and

West Bengal West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the four ...

. It is a recognised regional language of India per the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is spoken by around 7.0 million people in

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 ...

Bangladesh Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million pe ...

Bhutan Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountai ...

and

Nepal Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne, सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is ma ...

, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer. Santali was a mainly oral language until the development of

by Pandit

Raghunath Murmu Pandit Raghunath Murmu (May 1905 – 1 February 1982) was an Indian Santali writer and educator. He developed the Ol Chiki script for Santali language. Until the nineteenth century, Santali people had no written language and knowledge was tra ...

in 1925. Ol Chiki is alphabetic, sharing none of the syllabic properties of the other Indic scripts, and is now widely used to write Santali in India.

History

According to linguist Paul Sidwell, Munda languages probably arrived on the coast of

from Indochina about 4000–3500 years ago,and spread after the

Indo-Aryan migration The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lank ...

. Until the nineteenth century, Santali had no

written language A written language is the representation of a spoken or gestural language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will pick up spoken language or sign language by exposure even ...

and all shared knowledge was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation. European interest in the study of the languages of India led to the first efforts at documenting the Santali language. Bengali, Odia and Roman scripts were first used to write Santali before the 1860s by European anthropologists, folklorists and missionaries including A. R. Campbell, Lars Skrefsrud and Paul Bodding. Their efforts resulted in Santali dictionaries, versions of folk tales, and the study of the morphology, syntax and phonetic structure of the language. The Ol Chiki script was created for Santali by Mayurbhanj poet

in 1925 and first publicised in 1939. Ol Chiki as a Santali script is widely accepted among Santal communities. Presently in

, and

, Ol Chiki is the official script for Santali literature & language. However, users from Bangladesh use Bengali script instead. Santali was honoured in December 2013 when the University Grants Commission of India decided to introduce the language in the National Eligibility Test to allow lecturers to use the language in colleges and universities.

Geographic distribution

The highest concentrations of Santali language speakers are in Santhal Pargana division, as well as East Singhbhum and Seraikela Kharsawan districts of

, the Jangalmahals region of

( Jhargram, Bankura and Purulia districts) and Mayurbhanj district of

. Smaller pockets of Santali language speakers are found in the northern Chota Nagpur plateau ( Hazaribagh, Giridih,

Ramgarh Ramgarh may refer to: Bangladesh * Ramgarh Upazila, a sub-district of Khagrachari District India * Ramgarh, Bihar, a village near Munger, Bihar * Ramgarh, Kaimur, a town in Kaimur district, Bihar * Ramgarh, Uttarakhand, a hill station in Nainit ...

, Bokaro and Dhanbad districts),

Balesore Balasore or Baleswara is a city in the state of Odisha, about north of the state capital Bhubaneswar and from Kolkata, in eastern India. It is the largest town of northern Odisha and the administrative headquarters of Balasore district. I ...

and Kendujhar districts of Odisha, and throughout western and northern

( Birbhum, Paschim Medinipur, Hooghly, Paschim Bardhaman, Purba Bardhaman, Malda, Dakshin Dinajpur, Uttar Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling districts), Banka district and Purnia division of Bihar (

Araria Araria is a city and a municipality that is the headquarters of Araria district in the Indian state of Bihar. Araria is situated in the northern part of Bihar. Etymology During the British Raj the area was under the administration of a B ...

, Katihar, Purnia and Kishanganj districts), and tea-garden regions of Assam ( Kokrajhar, Sonitpur, Chirang and Udalguri districts). Outside India, the language is spoken in pockets of Rangpur and Rajshahi divisions of northern Bangladesh as well as the Morang and Jhapa districts in the Terai of Province No. 1 in

. Santali is spoken by over seven million people across

, and

. According to 2011 census, India has a total of 7,368,192 Santali speakers (including 3,58,579 Karmali, 26,399 Mahli). State wise distribution is

(2.75 million),

(2.43 million),

(0.86 million),

(0.46 million),

(0.21 million) and a few thousand in each of Chhattisgarh, Mizoram,

Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh (, ) is a state in Northeastern India. It was formed from the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and became a state on 20 February 1987. It borders the states of Assam and Nagaland to the south. It share ...

and

Official status

Santali is one of India's 22 scheduled languages. It is also recognised as the additional official language of the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal.

Dialects

Dialects of Santali include Kamari-Santali, Karmali (Khole), Lohari-Santali, Mahali, Manjhi, Paharia.

Phonology

Consonants

Santali has 21 consonants, not counting the 10 aspirated stops which occur primarily, but not exclusively, in Indo-Aryan loanwords and are given in parentheses in the table below. :* only appears as an allophone of // before //. In native words, the opposition between voiceless and voiced stops is neutralised in word-final position. A typical Munda feature is that word-final stops are "checked", i. e. glottalised and unreleased.

Vowels

Santali has eight oral and six

nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery ** ...

vowel phonemes. With the exception of /e o/, all oral vowels have a nasalized counterpart. There are numerous diphthongs.

Morphology

Santali, like all Munda languages, is a suffixing agglutinating language.

Nouns

Nouns are inflected for number and case.

Number

Three numbers are distinguished: singular, dual and plural.

Case

The case suffix follows the number suffix. The following cases are distinguished:

Possession

Santali has possessive suffixes which are only used with kinship terms: 1st person ''-ɲ'', 2nd person ''-m'', 3rd person ''-t''. The suffixes do not distinguish possessor number.

Pronouns

The personal pronouns in Santali distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person and anaphoric and demonstrative third person. The interrogative pronouns have different forms for animate ('who?') and inanimate ('what?'), and referential ('which?') vs. non-referential. The indefinite pronouns are: The demonstratives distinguish three degrees of deixis (proximate, distal, remote) and simple ('this', 'that', etc.) and particular ('just this', 'just that') forms.

Numerals

The basic cardinal numbers (transcribed into Latin script IPA) are: The numerals are used with numeral classifiers. Distributive numerals are formed by reduplicating the first consonant and vowel, e.g. ''babar'' 'two each'. Numbers basically follow a base-10 pattern. Numbers from 11 to 19 are formed by addition, "gel" ('10') followed by the single-digit number (1 through 9). Multiples of ten are formed by multiplication: the single-digit number (2 through 9) is followed by "gel" ('10'). Some numbers are part of a base-20 number system. 20 can be "bar gel" or "isi".

Verbs

Verbs in Santali inflect for tense, aspect and mood, voice and the person and number of the subject and sometimes of the object.

Subject markers

Object markers

Transitive verbs with pronominal objects take infixed object markers.

Syntax

Santali is an

SOV language SOV may refer to: * SOV, Service Operations Vessel * SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank * SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands * SOV, the National Rail station ...

, though topics can be fronted.

Influence on other languages

Borrowing between Santali and other Indian languages has not yet been studied fully. In modern Indian languages like Western Hindi the steps of evolution from Midland Prakrit Sauraseni could be traced clearly. In the case of Bengali such steps of evolution are not always clear and distinct, and one has to look at other influences that moulded Bengali's essential characteristics. A notable work in this field was initiated by linguist Byomkes Chakrabarti in the 1960s. Chakrabarti investigated the complex process of

assimilation Assimilation may refer to: Culture *Cultural assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and customs **Language shift, also known as language assimilation, the progre ...

of Austroasiatic family, particularly Santali elements, into Bengali. He showed the overwhelming influence of Bengali on Santali. His formulations are based on the detailed study of two-way influences on all aspects of both languages and tried to bring out the unique features of the languages. More research is awaited in this area. Notable linguist Khudiram Das authored the Santali Bangla Samashabda Abhidhan''' (), a book focusing on the influence of the Santali language on Bengali and providing a basis for further research on this subject.
Bangla Santali Bhasha Samparka
() is a collection of essays in E-book format authored by him and dedicated to linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji on the relationship between the Bengali and Santali languages.

References

Works cited

External links

National Translation Mission's (NTM) Santali Pages

OLAC resources in and about the Santali language

OLAC resources in and about the Mahali language

RWAAI Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage

Santali language in RWAAI Digital Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Santali Language Munda languages Santhal Official languages of India Languages of Assam Languages of Bihar Languages of Jharkhand Languages of Mizoram Languages of Odisha Languages of Tripura Languages of West Bengal Languages of Bangladesh Languages with own distinct writing systems Languages written in Indic scripts Languages attested from the 19th century Santali people Sahitya Akademi recognised languages