Ethnicity Sora Glottolog sora1254 Spoken by Sora people Region Odisha | ISO 639-3 srb Native speakers 250,000 Native to India | |
Language family Austroasiatic languages, Munda languages Writing system Telugu script, Sorang Sompeng alphabet, Latin script | ||
Opino gomango on sora language
Sora, or Savara (also Saora, Saonras, Shabari, Sabar, Saura, Sawaria, Swara, Sabara), is a Munda language of India, spoken by some 288,000 native speakers (1997) in South Odisha in eastern India. Sora is written in the Latin and Telugu scripts, as well as the Sorang Sompeng script devised for the language in 1936. Many Sora people have the family name or surname Savara. The Sora people themselves are indigenous to India and, along with other indigenous tribes, are known as adivasi or first people.
Contents
A supposed Dravidian language with the same name is evidently spurious.
Juray is considered by some to be a dialect of Sora.
An interesting feature of the Sora language is that its verbs are polysynthetic
Distribution
Speakers are concentrated mainly in Ganjam District, Gajapati District (central Gumma Hills region (Gumma Block), etc.), and Rayagada District, but are also found in adjacent areas such as Koraput and Phulbani districts; other communities exist in northern Andhra Pradesh (Vizianagaram District and Srikakulam District), Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and the Plains Division of Assam.
Phonology
Sora has 18 consonants. Obstruents may be pre-glottalized, i.e. [ʔm], [ʔb], but this awaits further analysis in Sora.
Vowels
Sora has 8 vowels that can each be stressed, with the exception of [ə] which cannot be stressed. Vowel length is not phonemic in Sora, although vowel length varies lexically and based on stress or expressiveness.
Media coverage
Sora was one of the subjects of Ironbound Films' 2008 American documentary film The Linguists, in which two linguists attempted to document several moribund languages.