Rajasthani language

History

Rajasthani has a rich tradition of literature aging approximately 1500 years. Ancient astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta of Bhinmal (town in Jalore, Rajasthan) composed Brahsfut Siddhanta. In 779 A.D., Udhyotan Suri wrote Kuvalaya Mala partly in Prakrit & partly in Aprabransh. Maru-Gurjar or Maruwani or Gujjar Bhakha (1100–1500 AD), ancestor of Gujarati and Rajasthani, was spoken by the Gurjars in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Texts of this era display characteristic Gujarati features such as direct/oblique noun forms, post-positions, and auxiliary verbs. It had three genders as Gujarati does today. During the medieval period, the literary language split away from Gujarati.

By around 1300 CE a fairly standardised form of this language emerged. While generally known as Old Gujarati, some scholars prefer the name of Old Western Rajasthani, based on the argument that Gujarati and Rajasthani were not distinct at the time. Also factoring into this preference was the belief that modern Rajasthani sporadically expressed a neuter gender, based on the incorrect conclusion that the [ũ] that came to be pronounced in some areas for masculine [o] after a nasal consonant was analogous to Gujarati's neuter [ũ]. A formal grammar of the precursor to this language was written by Jain monk and eminent scholar Hemachandra Suri in the reign of Solanki king Siddharaj Jayasinh of Anhilwara (Patan). Maharana Kumbha wrote "Sangeet Raj", a book on musicology and a treatise on Jai Deva’s Geet Govinda.

Classification

The Rajasthani languages belong to the Western Indo-Aryan language family. However, they are controversially conflated with the Hindi languages of the Central-Zone in the Indian national census, among other places. The varieties of the Rajasthani language are:

Geographical distribution

Most of the Rajasthani languages are chiefly spoken in the state of Rajasthan but are also spoken in Gujarat, Haryana and Punjab. Rajasthani languages are also spoken in the Bahawalpur and Multan sectors of the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Tharparkar district of Sindh. It merges with Riasti and Saraiki in Bahawalpur and Multan areas, respectively. It comes in contact with Sindhi from Dera Rahim Yar Khan through Sukkur and Ummerkot. This language is common in many areas of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Many linguists (Shackle, 1976 and Gusain, 2000) agree that it shares many phonological (implosives), morphological (future tense marker and negation) and syntactic features with Riasti and Saraiki. A distribution of the geographical area can be found in 'Linguistic Survey of India' by George A. Grierson.

Official status

As recently as 1873, westerners like Samuel H. Kellogg, who possessed enough knowledge of the Indian vernaculars to revise the Hindi translation of the Bible and to write Hindi Vyakaran, a well-received grammar, considered the dialects of Rajasthani only as a subgroup of western Hindi. In 1908 George Abraham Grierson for the first time considered the dialects jointly under the name of Rajasthani.

Today, both India's national academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi, and its University Grants Commission recognize Rajasthani as a distinct language, and it is taught as such in both Jodhpur's Jai Narain Vyas University and Udaipur's Mohanlal Sukhadia University. The state Board of Secondary Education included Rajasthani in its course of studies, and it has been an optional subject since 1973. National recognition has lagged, however.

In 2003 the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution to insert recognition of Rajasthani into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. “Twelve years have passed, but there has absolutely been no forward movement,” Suresh Khandelwal, a senior member of the Rajasthani Bhasha Manyata Samiti, lamented at a New Delhi press conference during his announcement of the pressure group's planned all-day sit-in in New Delhi in May 2015. All 25 Members of Parliament elected from Rajasthan state as well as Rajasthan's Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, have also voiced support for official recognition of the language.

Writing system

In India, Rajasthani is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida which is written from left to right. Earlier, the Muriya script was used to write Rajasthani. In Pakistan, where Rajasthani is considered a minor language, a variant of the Sindhi script is used to write Rajasthani dialects.

Salient features

In common with most other Indo-Iranian languages, the basic sentence typology is subject–object–verb. On a lexical level, Rajasthani has perhaps a 50 to 65 percent overlap with Hindi, based on a comparison of a 210-word Swadesh list. Most pronouns and interrogative words differ from Hindi, but the language does have several regular correspondences with, and phonetic transformations from, Hindi. The /s/ in Hindi is often realized as /h/ in Rajasthani — for example, the word ‘gold’ is /sona/ (सोना) in Hindi and /hono/ (होनो) in the Marwari dialect of Rajasthani. Furthermore, there are a number of vowel substitutions, and the Hindi /l/ sound (ल) is often realized in Rajasthani as /ll/ (ळ).

Phonology

Rajasthani has 10 vowels and 31 consonants. Three lexical tones: Low, Mid, High (Gusain 2000). Three implosives (b, d, g). Abundance of Front Open Vowel (e.g., javɛ, Khavɛ..)

Morphology

Rajasthani has two numbers and two genders with three cases. Postpositions are of two categories, inflexional and derivational. Derivational postpositions are mostly omitted in actual discourse.

Syntax

Prominent linguists

Linguists and their work and year: [Note: Works concerned only with linguistics, not with literature]