Rajasthani language

Rajasthani has a literary tradition going back approximately 1500 years. The ancient astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta of Bhinmal composed the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta. In 779 AD, Udhyotan Suri wrote the Kuvalaya Mala partly in Prakrit and partly in Apabhraṃśa. Maru-Gurjar or Maruwani or Gujjar Bhakha (1100–1500 AD), ancestor of Gujarati and Rajasthani, was spoken by the Gurjars in Gujarat and Rajasthan.[5] Texts of this era display characteristic Gujarati features such as direct/oblique noun forms, post-positions, and auxiliary verbs. It had three genders as Gujarati does today. During the medieval period, the literary language split away from Gujarati.

By around 1300 CE a fairly standardised form of this language emerged. While generally known as Old Gujarati, some scholars prefer the name of Old Western Rajasthani, based on the argument that Gujarati and Rajasthani were not distinct at the time. Also factoring into this preference was the belief that modern Rajasthani sporadically expressed a neuter gender, based on the incorrect conclusion that the [ũ] that came to be pronounced in some areas for masculine [o] after a nasal consonant was analogous to Gujarati's neuter [ũ]. A formal grammar of the precursor to this language was written by Jain monk and eminent scholar Hemachandra Suri in the reign of Solanki king Jayasimha Siddharaja. Maharana Kumbha wrote Sangeet Raj, a book on musicology and a treatise on Jai Deva’s Geet Govinda.

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 varieties of the Rajasthani language are:[6]

• Standard Rajasthani: the common lingua franca of Rajasthani people and is spoken by over 18 million people (2001) in different parts of Rajasthan.[7] It has to be taken into consideration, however, that some speakers of Standard Rajasthani are conflated with Hindi speakers in the census.
• Marwari: the most spoken Rajasthani language with approximately 7.5 to 10 million speakers situated in the historic Marwar region of western Rajasthan. The 2001 census, however, records only 7.9 million speakers. Like Standard Rajasthani, many Marwari speakers are conflated with Hindi speakers in the census.
• Malvi: approximately 10 million speakers in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh.
• Dhundhari: approximately 8 million speakers in the Dhundhar region of Rajasthan.
• Harauti: approximately 4 million speakers in the Hadoti region of Rajasthan.
• Mewari: approximately 5 million speakers in the Mewar region of Rajasthan.
• Ahirwati: approximately 3 Million speakers in the Ahirwal regions, comprising Haryana, Delhi and Rajasthan.
• Shekhawati: approximately 3 million speakers in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan.
• Wagdi:approx 2.2 million speakers, spoken mainly in southern region which include Dungarpur & Banswara districts also called Wagad region.
• Bagri: approximately 1.4 million speakers in northern Rajasthan and northwestern Haryana. There are also speakers situated in southern Punjab.
• Nimadi: approximately 2.2 million speakers in the Nimar region of Madhya Pradesh.
• Other Rajasthani languages are Dhatki, Godwari, Gujari, Gurgula, Goaria and Lambadi.

Most of the Rajasthani languages are chiefly spoken in the state of Rajasthan but are also spoken in Gujarat, Haryana and Punjab. Rajasthani languages are also spoken in the Bahawalpur and Multan sectors of the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Tharparkar district of Sindh. It merges with Riasti and Saraiki in Bahawalpur and Multan areas, respectively. It comes in contact with Sindhi from Dera Rahim Yar Khan through Sukkur and Ummerkot. This language is common in many areas of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Many linguists (Shackle, 1976 and Gusain, 2000) agree that it shares many phonological (implosives), morphological (future tense marker and negation) and syntactic features with Riasti and Saraiki. A distribution of the geographical area can be found in 'Linguistic Survey of India' by George A. Grierson.

Today, both India's National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi[8], and its University Grants Commission recognize Rajasthani as a distinct language, and it is taught as such in both Jodhpur's Jai Narain Vyas 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.”[9]

All 25 Members of Parliament elected from Rajasthan state,[9] as well as Rajasthan's Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia,[10] have also voiced support for official recognition of the language.

In India, Rajasthani is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida which is written from left to right. Earlier, the Mahajani script, or Muriya, was used to write Rajasthani. In Pakistan, where Rajasthani is considered a minor language,[11] a variant of the Sindhi script is used to write Rajasthani dialects.[12][13]

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/ (सोना) in Hindi and /hono/ (होनो) in the Marwari dialect of Rajasthani. Furthermore, there are a number of vowel substitutions, and the Hindi /l/ sound (ल) is often realized in Rajasthani as a retroflex lateral /ɭ/ (ळ).

Linguists and their work and year: [Note: Works concerned only with linguistics, not with literature]

• Kan Singh Parihar: English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Marwari, Rajasthani, 1940
• Anvita Abbi: Bagri, 1993
• Christopher Shackle: Bagri and Saraiki, 1976
• David Magier: Marwari, 1983
• George Abraham Grierson : Almost all the dialects of Rajasthani, 1920
• George Macalister: Dhundhari and Shekhawati, 1892
• Gopal Parihar: Bagri, 2004–present
• John D. Smith: Rajasthani, 1970–present
• J. C. Sharma: Gade lohar, Bagri or Bhili, Gojri, 1970–present
• Kali Charan Bahl: Rajasthani, 1971–1989
• K. C. Agrawal: Shekhawati, 1964
• L. P. Tessitori: Rajasthani and Marwari, 1914–16
• Lakhan Gusain: all the dialects of Rajasthani, 1990–present
• Liudmila Khokhlova: Rajasthani and Marwari, 1990–present
• Narottam Das Swami: Rajasthani and Marwari, 1960
• Peter E. Hook: Rajasthani and Marwari, 1986
• Ram Karan Asopa: Rajasthani and Marwari, 1890–1920
• Sita Ram Lalas: Rajasthani language, 1950–1970
• Saubhagya Singh Shekhawat Rajasthani, : Rajasthani Shabd-Kosh part I Sanshodhan Parivardhan, 1945–present
• Suniti Kumar Chatterjee: Rajasthani, 1948–49
• W.S. Allen: Harauti and Rajasthani, 1955–60

• List of Rajasthani Poets
• Rajasthani literature
• Rajasthani people

Rajasthani language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rajasthani language.

• Mahajani script