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Nihali language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Nihali | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | India | |
| Region: | Maharashtra | |
| Total speakers: | 2,000 (1991) | |
| Language family: | language isolate Nihali |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | mis | |
| ISO 639-3: | nll | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Nihali is a language isolate of India. It is spoken by some 2,000 people (1991) in the Buldana District of Maharashtra. Speakers are bilingual in Korku, Hindi or Marathi, and the language shows strong lexical convergence with Korku and Dravidian (60% to 70% of vocabulary items). Nihali is assumed to be the last surviving member of a language family formerly spoken more widely and marginalized by a prehistoric expansion of the Munda and Dravidian families.
Nihali was formerly conflated with, but is not to be confused with the Indo-Aryan Nahali language.
Kuiper (1962) conjectured that it is unrelated to any other Indian language but, even if that is so, its vocabulary has over the millennia been heavily influenced, in turn by Munda, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan.
Nihali is possibly related to another near-extinct remnant of the Indian linguistic substratum, namely Kusunda, spoken in central Nepal. Some scholars, including Michael Witzel of Harvard suggest, quoting Shafer and Kuiper, a possible relationship to Ainu.
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition 2005 (online version).
- Kuiper, F. B. J. (1962) "Nahali: A Comparative Study". Noord-Hollandshe. Amsterdam.