Native to India ISO 639-3 lbm | Native speakers 25,000 (2007 survey) Glottolog lodh1246 | |
Region Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand Language family Austroasiatic
Munda
Koraput
Savara
Lodhi | ||
Lodhi (Lodi, Lohi, Lozi) is a Munda language, or perhaps dialect cluster, of India that has been strongly influenced by neighboring Eastern Indic languages.
Ethnologue notes high levels of lexical similarity (50–75%) with Oriya, Bengali, and Kharia Thar, and that it is only spoken by one quarter of ethnic Lodhi in Orissa. However, while admitting that Lodhi is related to Sora, a Munda language, Ethnologue classifies it as Indic (Bengali–Assamese), and it is considered a variety of Hindi in the Indian census. It may be that there are both Munda and Indic varieties subsumed under the name Lodhi.
However, Anderson (2008:299) suggests that Lodhi (Lodha) of northern Orissa may be an Indo-Aryan lect rather than an endangered Munda language; some members use the autonym Sabar[a].
Locations
Lodhi is spoken in (Ethnologue):