Santhali

Santhali is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily by the Santhal people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal. It is the most widely spoken Munda language and is recognized as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The language is spoken by over seven million people. Santhali has a rich oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, and folklore.

Historically, Santhali was primarily an oral language, but various scripts have been developed and used for it over time. Ol Chiki is the most prominent and widely used script, created by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in the 20th century. Other scripts like Bengali, Devanagari, and Latin alphabets have also been used for writing Santhali, particularly in earlier periods and by different communities.

Santhali literature has been growing, with published works in poetry, prose, and drama. The language is an integral part of Santhal cultural identity, and efforts are ongoing to promote its preservation and development through education and literary initiatives. The grammatical structure of Santhali is agglutinative, meaning that suffixes are added to root words to modify their meaning and grammatical function.