Santali (, , , , ) is a Kherwarian Munda language spoken natively by the Santal people of South Asia. It is the most widely-spoken language of the Munda subfamily of the Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal. It is one of the constitutionally scheduled official languages of the Indian Republic and the additional official language of Jharkhand and West Bengal per the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is spoken by around 7.6 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer.
Santali is characterised by a split into at least a northern and southern dialect sphere, with slightly different sets of phonemes: Southern Santali has six phonemic vowels, in contrast with eight or nine in Northern Santali, different lexical items, and to a certain degree, variable morphology. Santali is recognised by linguists as being phonologically conservative within the Munda branch. Unlike many Munda languages that had their vowel systems restructured and shrunk to five such as Mundari, Ho, and Kharia, Santali retains a larger vowel system of eight phonemic cardinal vowels, which is very unusual in the South Asian linguistic area. The language also uses vowel harmony processes in morphology and expressives similar to Ho and Mundari. Morphosyntactically, Santali, together with Sora, are considered less restructured than other Munda languages, having less influence from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Clause structure is topic-prominent by default.
Santali is primarily written in Ol Chiki script, an indigenous alphabetic writing system developed in 1925 by Santal writer Raghunath Murmu. Additionally, it is also written in various regional Indian writing systems such as Bengali-Assamese script, Odia script, Devanagari, and the Santali Latin alphabet.
Name The Santals call themselves hɔɽ (lit. 'man') and their language hɔɽ rɔɽ ("language of the Santals"). It is also referred as mãjhi bhasa ("language of the Majhis"), and the Santals, when being asked about their caste, sometimes call themselves maɲjhi or mãjhi ("village headman", "chief"). In North Bengal, the language is known as jaŋli or pahaɽia. In Bihar it is called parsi ("foreign"). The name Santal, in turn, was derived from Sāmanta-pāla ('dwellers of the frontiers') and was used by Bengalis to refer the Santals. L.O. Skrefsrud assumed that Santal was derived from Sãot, name of a place in Midnapore region in West Bengal where the Santals were supposed to have been settled in remote antiquity. In Nepal, the Santali language is known as Satar.
History According to linguist Paul Sidwell, proto-Munda language speakers ancestral of Santali probably arrived on the coast of Odisha from Indochina about 4000–3500 years ago, and spread before the Indo-Aryan migration to the Chota Nagpur Plateau and adjacent areas.Sidwell, Paul. 2018. Austroasiatic Studies: state of the art in 2018. Presentation at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 22 May 2018.
Santali remained non-literary until the mid-1800s, when European interest in the languages of India led to the first efforts to document it. The language was initially recorded using the Latin alphabet, then Bengali, Devanagari, and Odia by European-American anthropologists, folklorists, and missionaries such as Jeremiah Phillips, A. R. Campbell, Lars Skrefsrud, and Paul Bodding. Their work resulted in Santali dictionaries, collections of folk tales, and studies on the language’s morphology, syntax, and phonetics. By the late 19th-century, several Santal intellectuals began to use several writing systems to compose books, stories, and poems in their language. The first Santali weekly magazine in Latin alphabet, the Pera Ho̠ṛ, was established in 1922, followed by the Marshal Tabon (1946); Bihar-run Devanagari Ho̠ṛ So̠mbad (1947), Bengali Pachim Bangla (1956), and the Jug Siriro̠l (since 1971) in Latin. There are two Bangladesh-based Santali monthly magazines–Aboak’ kurumuTureak’ Kurai and GoDet’–both written in Bengali script and published from Rangpur and Dhaka, respectively.
In 1922, Sadhu Ramchand Murmu from Jhargram district of West Bengal attempted to create a Santali script called Monj Dander Ank, but it did not gain popularity. Later, in 1925, Raghunath Murmu from Mayurbhanj district of Odisha developed the Ol Chiki script, which was first publicised in 1939 and eventually became widely adopted. The Ol Chiki script is now considered as official script for Santali literature and language across West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkhand. However, users from Bangladesh use Bengali script instead.
Santali was included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India for official recognition as a scheduled language in 2003 through the 92nd Amendment Act, granting it the right to be used in government communication, education, and competitive examinations. In December 2013, the UGC, the higher education regulatory body of India, introduced Santali as a subject in the National Eligibility Test (NET), enabling its use for lectureship and as a medium of instruction in colleges and universities.
Geographic distribution
Santali is spoken by over seven million people across India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, with India being its native country and having the largest number of speakers amongst the four. According to 2011 census, India has a total of 7,368,192 Santali speakers (including 358,579 Karmali, 26,399 Mahli). State wise distribution is Jharkhand (2.75 million), West Bengal (2.43 million), Odisha (0.86 million), Bihar (0.46 million), Assam (0.21 million) and a few thousand in each of Chhattisgarh, and in north-eastern states Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram.
The highest concentrations of Santali language speakers are in Santhal Pargana division, as well as East Singhbhum and Seraikela Kharsawan districts of Jharkhand, the Jangalmahals region of West Bengal (Jhargram, Bankura and Purulia districts) and Mayurbhanj district of Odisha.
Smaller pockets of Santali language speakers are found in the northern Chota Nagpur plateau (Hazaribagh, Giridih, Ramgarh, Bokaro and Dhanbad districts), Balesore and Kendujhar districts of Odisha, and throughout western and northern West Bengal (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, 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 Koshi Province in Nepal.
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, Khole, Lohari-Santali, Mahali, Manjhi, Paharia.
Being scattered apart in many different pockets in one of the most densely-populated parts of India, Santali dialects are becoming increasingly distinct in phonology, morphology, and lexicon. Reports by R.N. Cust (1878) mentioned four or more dialects, while according to George Campbell, only two main Santali dialects are attested: Northern and Southern. Data gathered by Ghosh (1994) and Kobayashi et al. confirm Campbell's account. Northern Santali speakers are concentrated in Santhal Pargana division (Godda, Deoghar, Dumka, Jamtara, Sahibganj and Pakur), Hazaribagh, throughout the North Chotanagpur Division; Purnia and Bhagalpur divisions in Bihar; Malda division, Birbhum, Bankura, Murshidabad, Cooch Behar, and Jalpaiguri districts in West Bengal. Southern Santali speakers predominantly live in Southern Bankura, Purulia, Paschim Medinipur in West Bengal; Gumla, Simdega, the Singbhum districts of Jharkhand; Balesore and Kendujhar, and Mayurbhanj district of Odisha.
According to observation by Ghosh, "In the lexicon SS (Southern Santali) and NS (Northern Santali) are somewhat different, initiated by borrowing from the neighbouring languages. The local borrowings in the two dialects are so high that sometimes one appears to be unintelligible to the other. In certain cases the usage is also different."
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.
Bilabial Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal ()* Stop () () () () () () () () () () Fricative Trill/Flap Approximant * only appears as an allophone of // before //.
Contraction of a vowel may further contribute to the phonemic presence of aspirated consonants. Eg. dʱiri < dihiri "stone".
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. So in Santali, all stops in coda position are underlyingly voiced. Nominally, they are preglottalized and devoiced, but may resurface voicing optionally before vocalic suffixes. Eg. pɛrɛˀt͡ʃ [pɛrɛˀɟ̥̚] ("to fill") → [pɛrɛˀɟ̥̚-a-ɛ] ("he fills"). Sebeok (1943) and Ghosh (2008) treat the checked consonants as allophones of /p t t͡ʃ k/, since they are exclusively found in coda positions.
No Santali lexemes are found begin with onsets /ɽ-/ and /ŋ-/. Anderson (2007) suggests the presence of a series of prenasalized stops that occur mostly in medial and coda positions, based on the following words:
beɽmbak̚ "incorrectly" kʰəɽnduŋ ~ kʰəndɽuŋ "deep" kʰoɳɖo "ill conditioned" mɔ̃ɲd͡ʒ "beautiful" oʈʰŋgao "to steady on"
Bodding (1930) described that there are two types of /j/: a hardened fricative sound produced by forcing airflow through a narrow gap between the front of the tongue and the hard palate, "narrower than when pronouncing the vowel /i/." This sound appears to be a component of the lexical root. Eg. [hoʝo] "to shave". The other /j/ is an intervocalic semivowel that are found in between level diphthongs in actual speech, but not seen in writing. Eg. [miʔʲug] "era".
Vowels Santali has eight oral and six nasal vowel phonemes. With the exception of /e o/, all oral vowels have a nasalised counterpart. Nasalization is phonemic in Santali, eg. aɽɔt "dense" vs aɽɔ̃t "unsympathetic, filthy."
Front Central Back High Mid-high Mid-low Low
The Southern Santali dialect (Singhbhum) features a smaller inventory of six vowels /a, i, e, o, u, ə/.