Baleswari Odia

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Balesoria, or Baleswari Odia is the northern dialect of India's Odia language [1]. The exonym Baleswari-Odia or the endonym Balesoria is spoken by the Odia people from the Balasore (Baleshwar) district of the Indian state of Odisha and some of the neighbouring areas of this district, both in Odisha and also in the state of West Bengal. Though the exact number of Balesoria speakers is not counted in the Indian census, the total population of the Balasore district in the 2011 census, 2,317,419, could be an approximate reference point. The dialectic variants from Odisha's Bhadrak, Mayurbhanj and Kendujhar districts and the Purba Medinipur and Paschim Medinipur districts of West Bengal can be together called Northern Odia, and Balesoria is sometimes interchangeably used for this dialect. Medinipuria or Midnapore-Odia is considered a separate dialect in specific contexts. While sharing some forms with standard spoken Odia, Balesoria deviates in terms of vocabulary and intonation with its own unique forms. Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha, a lexicon published between 1931 and 1940, lists 790 Balesoria lemmas. Between 2014-2015, Subhashish Panigrahi interviewed his 93-year-old grandmother Musamoni for an oral history project. Edited into the 2022 documentary Nani Ma [2], the recordings of these interviews provided valuable insights into both current and outdated Baleswari Odia vocabulary and the 1920s register of the dialect. From 2016 onwards, Panigrahi used a privately hosted spreadsheet to document more Balesoria words from everyday conversation. Additionally, more words were extracted from the tweets from the Twitter handle "@balesoria" and responses to tweets by users from various geographic locations. All of these helped to add more words. As of August 2021, the wordlist contained 1,801 words. After merging all the 790 words from Bhashakosha with some deduplication, the final list contained 2,060 headwords as of January 2022. However, this list was not exhaustive and…