Rajasthani languages
The Rajasthani languages are a group of various languages derived from Western Indo-Aryan languages, primarily spoken in Rajasthan and Malwa, and adjacent areas of Haryana, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India and Bahawalpur division of Pakistani Punjab and the adjacent areas of Sindh. They have also reached different corners of India, especially eastern and southern parts, due to the migrations of people of the Marwari community who use them for internal communication. Rajasthani languages are also spoken to a lesser extent in Nepal, where they are spoken by 25,394 people according to the 2011 Census of Nepal.
The term Rajasthani is also used to refer to a literary language mostly based on Marwari.
Geographical distribution
Most of the Rajasthani languages are chiefly spoken in the state of Rajasthan, but are also spoken in Gujarat, Western Madhya Pradesh, i.e. Malwa, and Nimar, Haryana, and Punjab. Rajasthani languages are also spoken in the Bahawalpur division of the Punjab and the Tharparkar district of Sindh in Pakistan. A distribution of the geographical area can be found in 'Linguistic Survey of India' by George A. Grierson.Speakers
Standard Rajasthani or Standard Marwari, a version of Rajasthani, the common lingua franca of Rajasthani people and is spoken by over 25 million people in different parts of Rajasthan. It has to be taken into consideration, however, that some speakers of Standard Marwari are conflated with Hindi speakers in the census. Marwari, the most spoken Rajasthani language with approximately 8 million speakers situated in the historic Marwar region of western Rajasthan.In Indian census reporting, many Rajasthani varieties are counted under the broader “Hindi” language category as mother tongues, which can make it difficult to compare speaker totals across sources. Linguists and reference works therefore often discuss “Rajasthani” as a language cluster that includes major varieties such as Marwari, Malvi, Mewari, Dhundhari, Harauti, Nimadi and Bagri, while also noting that boundaries between “language” and “dialect” labels vary by framework.
Rajasthani also has a recognized literary presence beyond state-level education and activism for constitutional recognition. India’s National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi, lists Rajasthani among the languages in which it runs literary programs and confers awards, even though it is not currently included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. In academic classification, major catalogues such as Glottolog and Ethnologue treat Rajasthani as a distinct Western Indo-Aryan grouping and provide structured listings of its principal varieties.
History
The various Rajasthani languages and dialects form a sub-branch of the Western Indo-Aryan languages. While references to a separate language of Rajasthan are as old as the 8th century it wasn't until the 18th century that a Rajasthani linguistic identity emerged.Classification
The Rajasthani languages belong to the Western Indo-Aryan language family. However, they are controversially conflated with the Hindi languages of the Central-Zone in the Indian national census, among other places. The main Rajasthani subgroups are:- Rajasthani
- *Western Rajasthani
- **Marwari
- ***Dhatki
- ***Godwari
- **Shekhawati
- **Mewari
- *Bhilli-Banjara Adivasi
- **Wagdi
- **Lambadi
- **Saharia
- *Northern Rajasthani
- **Bagri
- *** Bagri
- *** Vishnoi / Bishnoi Bagri Pawari
- **Dhundhari
- ***Jaipuri
- ***Nagarchol
- **Harauti
- **Nimadi
- ***Bhuwani
Languages and dialects
| Language | ISO 639-3 | Scripts | No. of speakers | Geographical distribution | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rajasthani | raj | [Devanagari">Bhoyari">Pawari Languages and dialects
Official statuswas the first scholar who gave the designation 'Rajasthani' to the language, which was earlier known through its various dialects.India's National Academy of Literature, the Sahitya Akademi, and University Grants Commission recognize Rajasthani as a distinct language, and it is taught as such in Bikaner's Maharaja Ganga Singh University, Jaipur's University of Rajasthan, Jodhpur's Jai Narain Vyas University, Kota's Vardhaman Mahaveer Open University and Udaipur's Mohanlal Sukhadia University. The state Board of Secondary Education included Rajasthani in its course of studies, and it has been an optional subject since 1973. National recognition has lagged, however. In 2003, the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution to insert recognition of Rajasthani into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. In May 2015, a senior member of the pressure group Rajasthani Bhasha Manyata Samiti said at a New Delhi press conference: "Twelve years have passed, but there has absolutely been no forward movement." All 25 Members of Parliament elected from Rajasthan state, as well as former Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, have also voiced support for official recognition of the language. In 2019 Rajasthan Government included Rajasthani as a language subject in state's open school system. A committee was formed by the Government in March 2023 to make Rajasthani an official language of the state after huge protests by the youths of Rajasthani Yuva Samiti. GrammarRajasthani is a head-final, or left-branching language. Adjectives precede nouns, direct objects come before verbs, and there are postpositions. The word order of Rajasthani is SOV, and there are two genders and two numbers. There are no definite or indefinite articles. A verb is expressed with its verbal root followed by suffixes marking aspect and agreement in what is called a main form, with a possible proceeding auxiliary form derived from to be, marking tense and mood, and also showing agreement. Causatives and passives have a morphological basis. It shares a 50%-65% lexical similarity with Hindi. It has many cognate words with Hindi. Notable phonetic correspondences include /s/ in Hindi with /h/ in Rajasthani. For example /sona/ 'gold' and /hono/ 'gold'. /h/ sometimes elides. There are also a variety of vowel changes. Most of the pronouns and interrogatives are, however, distinct from those of Hindi.
In common with most other Indo-Iranian languages, the basic sentence typology is subject–object–verb. On a lexical level, Rajasthani has perhaps a 50 to 65 percent overlap with Hindi, based on a comparison of a 210-word Swadesh list. Most pronouns and interrogative words differ from Hindi, but the language does have several regular correspondences with, and phonetic transformations from, Hindi. The /s/ in Hindi is often realized as /h/ in Rajasthani – for example, the word 'gold' is /sona/ in Hindi and /hono/ in the Marwari dialect of Rajasthani. Furthermore, there are a number of vowel substitutions, and the Hindi /l/ sound is often realized in Rajasthani as a retroflex lateral /ɭ/. |