Mundari language

Mundari (Mundari Bani: 𞓧𞓟𞓨𞓜𞓕𞓣𞓚, romanised: Muṇḍārī, IPA: Mundari pronunciation: [muɳɖaːriː]) is a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family spoken by the Munda tribes native to the Chota Nagpur Plateau region in India with over 1.5 million native speakers.^[4] It is closely related to Ho and Santali,^[5] and along with Bhumij, is one of the four major Munda languages. Mundari is an additional official language in the state of Jharkhand,^[6] and has significant speakers in eastern Indian states of Odisha and West Bengal and northern Rangpur Division of Bangladesh. In India, Mundari is recognised as a significant minority language. However, its speakers are often bilingual in Hindi or the local state language.

Mundari is an agglutinative language characterised by its complex morphology, where multiple affixes are added to roots to convey grammatical relationships.^[7] While historically transmitted through oral tradition, Mundari is now written using several scripts, most notably Mundari Bani, invented by Rohidas Singh Nag specifically to write Mundari.^[8][9] It has also been written in the Devanagari, Odia, Bengali, and Latin writing systems.

Mundari has been classified as a vulnerable language according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.^[10] It remains a subject of extensive linguistic study due to its unique grammatical structure and its role in understanding the migration patterns of Austroasiatic speakers in South Asia.

The term Muɳɖa means "village headman" in Mundari.^[11] Neighboring communities of the Mundas referred to their language as Muɳɖārī, and the Mundas themselves call it hoɽo dʒagar ("human language"; hoɽo–"man", dʒagar–"to speak, speech") or muɳɖa dʒagar ("Munda language").^[11] Studies on Mundari started in the nineteenth century, pioneered by the works of Haldar (1871), Whitley (1873), and Nottrott (1882), though most of them were brief sketches and documentations. Then in 1903, German missionary/linguist John Hoffmann initiated two massive and influential projects on Mundari: Mundari Grammar (1903–1905) and Encyclopaedia Mundarica (1903–1978), the latter was completed long after his death and was published posthumously.^[12]

Mundari is spoken in the Khunti, Ranchi, Seraikela Kharsawan and West Singhbhum, East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, and in the Mayurbhanj, Kendujhar, Sundargarh district of Odisha by at least 1.1 million people.^[14] Another 500,000, mainly in Odisha and Assam, are recorded in the census as speaking "Munda," potentially another name for Mundari.

In 2011, Mundari was recognised as an additional official language of Jharkhand under the Jharkhand Official Language (Amendment) Act, 2011. This status allows for the language to be used in administrative and cultural contexts alongside Hindi, the state's primary official language.^[6]

Mundari has the following dialects which are spoken mostly in Jharkhand state:^[15]

• Hasada (𞓞𞓕𞓛𞓡𞓕𞓙, [hasa-daʔ]): east of the Ranchi-Chaibasa Road
• Naguri (𞓨𞓕𞓦𞓟𞓣𞓚, [naɡuri]): west of the Ranchi-Chaibasa Road
• Tamaria (𞓝𞓕𞓧𞓕𞓪𞓚𞓕, [t̪amaɽ-ia]) or Latar (𞓒𞓕𞓝𞓕𞓫𞓣, [lat̪aɾ]): Panchpargana area (Tamar, Bundu, Rahe, Sonahatu, Silli)
• Kera (𞓢𞓤𞓣𞓕𞓙, [keraʔ]): ethnic Oraon who live in the Ranchi city area.

The phonology of Mundari is similar to the surrounding closely related Austroasiatic languages but considerably different from either Indo-Aryan or Dravidian. Perhaps the most foreign phonological influence has been on the vowels. Whereas the branches of Austroasiatic in Southeast Asia are rich in vowel phonemes, Mundari has only five. The consonant inventory of Mundari is similar to other Austroasiatic languages with the exception of retroflex consonants, which seem to appear only in loanwords. (Osada 2008)

Mundari has five vowel phonemes. All vowels have long and short as well as nasalized allophones, but neither length nor nasality are contrastive. All vowels in open monosyllables are quantitatively longer than those in closed syllables, and those following nasal consonants or /ɟ/ are nasalized. Vowels preceding or following /ɳ/ are also nasalized.

Mundari's consonant inventory consists of 23 basic phonemes. The Naguri and Kera dialects include aspirated stops as additional phonemes, here enclosed in parentheses.

The table below shows familial relations in Mundari:^[16]

In 1903, Hoffmann noted something abnormal with the Mundari lexicon: the lack of discrete lexical distinction. Mundari lexemes are not inherently specified for lexical categories. He made several following impressions:^[17]

Mundari words have such a great vagueness or functional elasticity that there can be no question of distinct parts of speech in that language

[...]Thus the same unchanged form is at the same time a Conjunction, an Adjective, a Pronoun, an Adverb, a Verb, and a Noun, or, to speak more precisely, it may become a Conjunction, an Adjective, and so on, but by itself alone it is none of them. It is simply a vague elastic word, capable of signifying, in a vague manner, several distinct concepts, that is of assuming a variety of functions.

Similar issues with word class distinction have been also reported in other Munda languages, especially North Munda (Santali (Bodding 1929, Ghosh 1994, Neukom 2001), Ho (Deeney 1978), Korku (Drake 1903, Zide (undated)), Kharia (Pinnow 1960, Peterson 2003), Juang. Grierson (1906) summarized the issue in his Linguistic Survey of India:

[...]The various classes of words are not clearly distinguished. The same base can often be used as a noun, an adjective, or a verb. Spoken language, of course, is not composed of words but of sentences, and the meaning of each individual word is only apparent from the context. The Munda words simply denote some being, object, action, or the like, but they do not tell us how they are conceived. It is for instance only after inspection of the context that we can decide whether a word denoting the idea "to give" means "giving" or "given."

Modern typologist interest in Mundari lexical categories was revitalized by Cook (1965), Langendoen (1967), Sinha (1975), Osada (1992), Bhat (1994), and most famously Evans & Osada (2005). Evans & Osada challenged the flexible analysis, contending instead that Mundari exhibits distinct yet exceptionally fluid grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). Their argument rests upon three specific criteria for assessing flexibility: (i) explicit semantic compositionality across both argument and predicate functions, (ii) bidirectionality, and (iii) exhaustiveness. This research prompted an extensive series of peer reviews and criticism within the same volume of Linguistic Typology.^[18] Notwithstanding these debates, Osada (1992), Badenoch & Osada (2019), and Badenoch et al. (2019) identify expressives as a further open lexical class in Mundari, encompassing a minimum of 1,500 lemmas. Mark Dingemanse comments: "yet the status of this considerable lexical stratum in the language has not featured in any word-class debates."^[19]

This section will leave out the discussions on Mundari & North Munda flexibility and focus on the morphological differences between two main dialects, Hasadaʔ and Keraʔ, specifically in relation to their respective approaches to lexical flexibility.

In Hasadaʔ Mundari, entity-denoting lexemes and structures or "noun"-like, "noun phrase"-like, and "adjective"-like all can be used as semantic bases of predicates (i.e. "verbs") without derivation. The "verbal" constructions' semantic results are often compositional (predictable), but sometimes they can be idiosyncratic.

In contrast, Keraʔ Mundari does not allow such blatant uses of "zero-derivation" (i.e. conversion) like in Hasadaʔ and other dialects. Nouns can only used as verbs with the sense of performing the semantical action with the presence of verbalizing suffix -o/-u.^[20] For examples:

1. aɽandi "wedding"

1. sindri "vermillion"

Regarding the limit of flexibility, there is an infix -n- that can be inserted into certain Mundari lexemes, which "transforms the verb root into an abstract inanimate noun stem, which is no longer capable of verb inflection". Per Hengeveld & Rijkhoff (2005), citing Cook (1965)'s data:^[21]

dal "strike" → da-n-al "a blow"

dub "sit" → du-n-ub "a meeting"

ol "to write" → o-n-ol "the writing"

Mandari is written in native Mundari Bani (Mundari: 𞓧𞓟𞓨𞓜𞓕𞓣𞓚 𞓗𞓕𞓨𞓚, romanized: Mundari Bani), invented in the 1980s by Rohidas Singh Nag, which has since seen limited but increasing use in literature, education, and computing. It is a true alphabet that consists of 27 distinct letters and 5 diacritical marks, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. The script is unicameral, written from left to right, and consonants do not possess an inherent vowel. They are organised into five clusters, each led by a primary vowel. The first letter of the consonant's name matches the primary vowel. Their names follow traditional naming schemes.^[22]

Mundari is also written in Odia, Devanagari and Bengali scripts.

The following text is Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in Mundari:^[24]

• Anderson, Gregory D.S, ed. (2008). The Munda languages. Routledge Language Family Series 3. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-32890-X.

• Evans, Nicholas & Toshki Osada. 2005b. Mundari and argumentation in word-class analysis. In Linguistic Typology 9.3, pp. 442–457
• Newberry, J. (2000). North Munda dialects: Mundari, Santali, Bhumia. Victoria, B.C.: J. Newberry. ISBN 0-921599-68-4
• Horo, Luke; Gogoi, Pamir; Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2023). "Phonetic Correlates of Syllable Prominence in Mundari". The Second International Conference on Tone and Intonation: 78–82. doi:10.21437/TAI.2023-17.
• Gogoi, Pamir; Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Horo, Luke (2024). "Phonetic and Phonological Analysis of the Mundari Vowel System". In Sidwell, Paul (ed.). Austroasiatic Linguistics, in honor of Gérard Diffloth (1939-2023). Chiang Mai University. pp. 75–90. ISBN 978-616-398-980-2.
• Horo, Luke; Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Gogoi, Pamir (2024). "Can Vowel Height and Onset Duration Cue Prominence in Mundari?". In Alves, Mark J. (ed.). Papers from the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. JSEALS Special Publications 13. University of Hawai'i Press. pp. 137–151.
• Osada, Toshiki (2008). "Mundari". The Munda Languages. New York: Routledge. pp. 99–164. ISBN 0-415-32890-X.
• Kobayashi, Masato; Murmu, Ganesh (2008). "Keraʔ Mundari". The Munda Languages. New York: Routledge. pp. 165–194. ISBN 0-415-32890-X.
• Badenoch, Nathan; Choksi, Nishant; Osada, Toshiki; Purti, Madhu (2021). "Performance in Elicitation: Methodological Considerations in the Study of Mundari Expressives". In Mohan, Shailendra (ed.). Advances in Munda Linguistics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 131–141. ISBN 1527570479.
• Evans, Nicholas; Osada, Toshiki (2005). "Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes". Linguistic Typology. 9 (3): 351-390. doi:10.1515/lity.2005.9.3.351. hdl:1885/54663. S2CID 121706232.
• Peterson, John M. (2005). "There's a grain of truth in every "myth", or, Why the discussion of lexical classes in Mundari isn't quite over yet". Linguistic Typology. 9 (3): 391–405.
• Hengeveld, Kees; Rijkhoff, Jan (2005). "Mundari as a Flexible Language". Linguistic Typology. 9 (3): 406–431.
• Croft, William (2005). "Word classes, parts of speech, and syntactic argumentation". Linguistic Typology. 9 (3): 431–441.
• Lier, Eva van, ed. (2023). The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198852889.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19188-7-185.

• Johann Hoffmann (1903). Mundari grammar. Bengal Secretariat Press. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
• J. C. Whitley (1873). A Mundári Primer. Bengal Secretariat Press. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
• Carl Gustav Rudolph Eduard Alfred Nottrott (1882). Grammatik der Kolh-Sprache. Gütersloh: Druck von C. Bertelsmann. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
• Four gospels in Mundari. Bible Society. 1881. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
• Mitra, P. K. (1956). Mundari Folk Tales. Translated by P. K. Mitra. Education Press.

• Mundari Bibliography at Department of Linguistics, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
• Detailed language map of eastern Nepal, see language #68 in green along eastern border
• http://projekt.ht.lu.se/rwaai RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage)
• http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-A6AA-C@view Mundari language in RWAAI Digital Archive
• https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21031r-mundari.pdf
• https://omniglot.com/writing/mundaribani.htm
• https://omniglot.com/writing/mundari.htm