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the 2022 documentary Nani Ma [2], the recordings of these interviews provided valuable insights into both current and outdated Baleswari Odia vocabulary and the 1920s register of the dialect.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 required further development. Balesoria uses postpositions and suffixes that often vary from those used in standard written Odia. Some forms are identical to the latter, but the intonations can differ widely between the two variations. In Balesoria, the exact words can also have various stresses and intonations attributed to them based on the speaker's mood.
It is worth noting that the written spelling of many words in Balesoria and standard Odia might be identical. However, the pronunciation and intonations can vary significantly between the two variations.
Panigrahi also published a wordlist containing 15,748 Balesoria words created from some of the 2,060 headwords and recorded the pronunciation of over 5,600 words [3]. In March 2022, 606 audio files from Nani Ma made a 6,100-word-rich pronunciation library. These audio files can be downloaded periodically in both word list and audio file formats. This Living Dictionaries version takes data from all these works.
[1] Mohanty, P. (1987). Where did/o/go in the northern dialect of Oriya? Indian Linguistics, 47, 76.
[2] Panigrahi, S. (Director). (2022). Nani Ma. In O Foundation. https://doi.org/10.5240/EC35-88D4-F77D-4284-3302-5
[3] Panigrahi, S. (2022). Building a Public Domain Voice Database for Odia. Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022, 1331–1338. https://doi.org/10.1145/3487553.3524931