Santali

Santali is a language of the Austroasiatic language family, belonging to the Munda subbranch. It is spoken by the Santali people in eastern India, with concentrations in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, and Assam, and by communities in parts of Nepal and Bangladesh. Estimates place the number of speakers in the millions. Santali uses a number of dialects with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility; classification and naming of dialects differ among scholars and communities.

Santali has its own script, Ol Chiki, created by Raghunath Murmu in 1925. Ol Chiki is used for writing modern Santali literature and education in some areas. In addition to Ol Chiki, Santali texts have been written in Devanagari, Bengali, and Odia scripts, particularly where those scripts are predominant locally.

Linguistically, Santali is an analytic language with extensive affixation and agglutination in its morphology, and typically follows a subject–object–verb order. It has a rich consonant inventory and vowel system characteristic of Munda languages, with several phonemic contrasts.

In India, Santali is recognized as one of the scheduled languages and is used in regional education and government in areas with significant Santali-speaking populations. In Nepal and Bangladesh, Santali speakers are present as minority communities with varying levels of language maintenance.