Sirmauri

Sirmauri is a language or, by some classifications, a dialect of the Indo-Aryan Western Pahari group spoken in the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India. It is named for the region and the people who traditionally inhabit it. The language is typically used in daily conversation within rural communities and forms an important part of local cultural identity.

Classification among linguists varies. Sirmauri is often described as a distinct language within Western Pahari, but some scholars classify it as a dialect of a broader Pahari continuum. It shares features with neighboring Western Pahari varieties and is part of the wider Hindi–Pahari linguistic zone that includes related languages spoken in the surrounding hills.

The number of speakers is not precisely documented and is generally understood to be in the tens of thousands, with ongoing shifts toward Hindi and other dominant languages in education, media, and public life. As with many regional languages in the region, intergenerational transmission can be uneven, and language vitality is a concern in some communities. Sirmauri is mainly oral, with limited standardized writing and no widely adopted script of its own; when written, it is commonly transcribed using scripts such as Devanagari.

Geographically, Sirmauri is concentrated in and around Sirmaur and nearby areas, with speakers also found in adjacent districts where communities have historical ties to the region. The language is an element of local heritage, including traditional songs, oral histories, and daily life.

See also: Western Pahari languages, Indo-Aryan language families, Himachal Pradesh.