Linguasphere 59-AAF-tb | Native speakers 600,000 | |
ISO 639-3 Either:hlb – Halbibhu – Bhunjia Glottolog halb1244 (Halbi)bhun1242 (Bhunjia) Language family Region | ||
Halbi (also Bastari, Halba, Halvas, Halabi, Halvi, Mahari, Mehari) is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, transitional between Oriya and Marathi. It is spoken by 500,000 people across the central part of India. It uses SOV word order (subject-object-verb), makes strong use of affixes, and places adjectives before nouns. It is often used as a trade language, but there is a low literacy rate.
The Mehari dialect is mutually intelligible with the other dialects only with difficulty. There are an estimated 200,000 second-language speakers (as of 2001). In Chhtisgarh Schooled males are fluent in Hindi. Some first language speakers use Bhatri as second language.
Halbi is written in the Oriya & Devanagari script.
References
Halbi language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA