Thar language
Thar, also known as Ther or Thet , is the traditional language of the Bede people, a semi‑nomadic riverine community of Bangladesh and parts of India. The language is predominantly oral, lacking a standardized writing system and is spoken within Bede communities across various districts, upazilas and towns including Savar, Kaliganj, Munshiganj, Sunamganj, Joydevpur, Mirsarai, Cumilla and Sonagazi. Most speakers are bilingual in Bengali.
The total number of Thar speakers is not well documented due to the community's mobility, internal dispersion and limited linguistic surveys, some say it is around 40,000. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European family, although it is sometimes considered part of the Chak-Luish or Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan family.
Grammar
Thar exhibits distinct linguistic features, including syntax, phonology, phonetic transformations, verb changes, morphology, tenses, moods, genders, sentence structure, and vocabulary. The language contains thousands of basic words, as well as synonyms and antonyms, and shows patterns in how social, economic, cultural and environmental terms are expressed and transformed in its lexicon. Thar exhibits nominal gender and inflects verbs for tense and mood. The language marks three tenses, present, past, and future and employs verb conjugation to express mood. Structurally, Thar follows a subject-object-verb word order, similar to neighboring Indo-Aryan languages. Verbs typically take suffixes to indicate tense and mood, a feature also found in Bengali. Thar uses postpositions to mark grammatical relations and maintains a clear distinction between present and past forms. The language's known vocabulary comprises approximately 2,131 words.Phonology
Thar utilizes the sounds, phonemes and letters of Bengali, though their pronunciation may vary. Some sounds are retained with identical pronunciation, while others undergo modification.Phonetic analysis indicates that Thar is based on the fifty letters of the Bengali alphabet. Among these, ten letters ঙ, ঞ, ণ, ড়, ঢ়, য়, ৎ, ং, ঃ and ঁ are never used as the initial letter of a word. Of the remaining forty letters, thirty-five, such as: ক, খ, গ, ঘ, চ, জ , ট, ঠ, ড, ঢ, ত, থ, দ, ধ, ন, প, ফ, ব, ভ, ম, য, র, ল, হ, অ, আ, ই, ঈ, উ, ঊ, ঋ, এ, ঐ, ও, ঔ, ৱ are typically transformed into the sound ঝ in Thar speech. For example, the Bengali word "চশমা" becomes ঝশমা, and বায়ান্ন becomes ঝায়ান্ন. Some words begin with ঝ instead of replacing the first letter completely, this only happens for vowel letters. Such as the word আমি would become ঝামি. The language uses Bengali's all eleven vowels.
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | ই~ঈ i | উ~ঊ u | |
| Close-mid | এ e | ও o | |
| Open-mid | অ ô | ||
| Open | আ a |
Conversely, the letters শ, ষ, স, ছ, and ঝ tend to be replaced with ন in Thar. For instance, শরৎকাল becomes নরৎকাল, and সবুজ becomes নবুজ. Despite these phonetic transformations, Thar also contains a number of unique, indigenous words not derived from Bengali. Besides ঝ and ন, Sometimes some letters are replaced with খ.
Morphology
The morphology of Thar has been examined to describe its structure and word formation. The language exhibits distinct patterns in the composition of words and morphemes, indicating both influence from Bengali and the presence of original grammatical features.History
The Thar language may have derivation from Middle Indo‑Aryan Prakrit forms, suggesting a long history of linguistic formation rather than a recent invention, Ethnographically, Thar shows influence from older Eastern Indo-Aryan forms and from the dialects of Rakhine and Chak speakers in Myanmar, Mizoram and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Many of its words originate from the early Prakrit form of Bengali. It was also influenced by Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, English and Hindustani besides Bengali and Arakanese.Status and usage
The Thar language is spoken by Bede or other river gyspy people only, not in mainstream society. The Thar language developed as a "community code" to be used internally. The language has no formal recognition or use in government activities. It is listed among "ethnic languages" in a digitisation project of Bangladesh's government including "Thar". Over time, modern developments have altered the Bede way of life, which in turn impacts the language. For example, more Bede children speak Bengali and fewer speak Thar regularly. Because the language is spoken in scattered communities across the Ganges Delta and plains, it has many dialects, subdialects and variations, some of which are unintelligible to one another.Today Thar is endangered, the language is used by fewer people, transmission to younger generations is weak and mainstream Bangla dominates.