The Birhor Living Dictionary is currently under construction. Existing data in the dictionary will be expanded through the addition of multimedia and sample sentences in 2025.

The data in this dictionary was compiled in person through elicitation and interviews with fluent Birhoɽ speakers between 2018 and 2021. Considering the severity of the Covid-19 situation in India in 2020-2021 and given the time constraints under which this dictionary was created, we are very much aware that there may still be numerous mistakes which will have to be corrected in upcoming revised editions.

The Birhor are a Munda-speaking, forest-dependent semi-nomadic tribal community with fewer than 20,000 members concentrated in the eastern central Indian state of Jharkhand and adjacent northern parts of the state of Odisha. Only a few thousand fluent speakers of the Birhor language remain at present as their way of life and their language are both under threat.

Until recently, many Birhor subsisted as hunter-gatherers living in leaf-huts setting up camps at the edge of village market areas, selling rope and rope products in local village markets; many now have been forced to live in settled agricultural communities, as forest degradation and urban encroachment has made hunting and gathering no longer viable as a way of life.  Officially a ‘primitive’ tribal group, the Birhor stand at the very bottom of the complex and multi-tiered ethno-religious and linguistic hierarchies that dominate Indian life. In northern Odisha, two different groups are officially known as ‘monkey-eaters’ and overtly despised.

The cultural and environmental context that the Birhor people are living in is changing rapidly and their language and culture are both poorly documented. Both will likely soon disappear without immediate action. Their knowledge of medicinal and nutritional uses of forest products is vast and unrivaled in India.

In 2019, we began a new project documenting Birhor language and culture. Our field team, comprised of trained tribal/indigenous Indian linguists, worked closely with Birhor indigenous experts to digitally document their fragile and now disappearing knowledge domains, such as local hunter-gatherer strategies, ethnobotany and rope-making techniques.

We also made strides documenting their rich oral literature, which forms an intimate connection with their traditional subsistence activities and helps shape the social cohesion of the community. Community empowerment may lead to further development projects and the Birhor people may be able to slowly change their socio-economic context over time, finding new ways to retain their identity.

The process of recruiting local Birhor consultants, training them in digital documentation techniques, and collaborating with them in a cultural empowerment project will result in first-time recordings of endangered cultural and linguistic knowledge and first-ever educational materials in the languages, and lead to valuable digital literacy for participating community members assisting them in future socio-economic mobility.

The Birhor speakers recorded in this Living Dictionary are: Malti Birhor, Biswanath Birhor, Bitni Birhor, Kaushila Birhor, Sima Birhor and Anil Birhor. We are grateful for their collaboration. The Birhor lexical documentation work was led by Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, Dr. Bikram Jora and Sashi Kant Lakra, with digital curation and technical assistance by Anna Luisa Daigneault and web development support and design by Diego Córdova Nieto and Jacob Bowdoin. 

SUPPORT
We gratefully acknowledge the grant that made this project possible:

2018-2020. Documenting the Fragile Knowledge Domains of the Birhor People. The Zegar Family Foundation. 

_____________________

Words are unique constituents of any language. Writing a dictionary for a critically endangered language like Birhoɽ is a difficult task. While the older community members still retain their language and use it among themselves, the younger people speak it only to a more limited degree, frequently migrating to nearby towns in search of livelihood in Jharkhand state. Even the speech of the elders reflects the influence of pronounced language contact. The Birhoɽ language has many loan words from local Indo-Aryan varieties including kin terms, numerals above two and even grammatical markers like the object case form.

This is the first-ever dictionary of this fascinating Kherwarian Munda language. It is hoped that this Birhoɽ dictionary will assist the younger generations of Birhoɽ people to acquaint themselves with their ancestral language that is on the verge of extinction, and be a part of the movement that might contribute towards the protection and revival of their heritage language, now actively used by very few people. During the process of documenting the Birhoɽ language, it has been observed that some words are produced by the speakers with certain variations. One kind of variation is observed in the use of loan words in place of the native Birhoɽ word and another type of variation is found in the phonetic alteration of Birhoɽ phonemes.

While a detailed investigation using instrumental acoustic phonetic techniques has not yet been achieved, Birhoɽ (like Mundari) appears to have a five-vowel system /a, e, i, o and u/. Vowel nasalization is present in the language, but may not be phonemic. Vowel length is realized phonetically but again does not appear to be contrastive. In the case of nasal consonant sounds, the velar nasal /ŋ/ (ङ) is used independently as in /dʒiliŋ / ‘long’ जिलिङ or siriŋem सिरिङेम ‘sing’ which contrasts with its presence in a sequence followed by a velar stop consonant like /g/ as in /eŋga/ एङगा - ‘mother’ or /reŋgeʧ/ रेङगेच - ‘hungry’. Additionally, a palatal nasal /ɲ/, is also found to be present in Birhoɽ. It can be found before the genitive suffix -aʔ as in iɲaʔ इञा ‘my’ and in a handful of roots. For this palatal nasal phoneme, the symbol ञा is used in this dictionary. Lastly, the Sanskrit Symbol visarga (:) is used at the end or in the middle of Birhoɽ words to indicate the glottal stop (ʔ) as in oɽaʔ ओड़ाः ‘house’. Its presence or absence is contrastive such as setaʔ ‘morning’ सेता: vs. seta ‘dog’ सेता.

The glottal stop and its use in the Devanagari alphabet to realize Birhoɽ words in the dictionary is intended to help facilitate development of a written form of the language where Hindi is dominant. One convention followed here worth noting is that subject markers are written together with the verb they occur with, except if the verb stem ends in a glottal stop. This matters as the citation form for verbs is the singular imperative which obligatorily has a person marker that occurs in several allomorphs. On occasion, all other subject markers are found on smaller numbers of forms. English is also included in this dictionary to underscore the value of Birhoɽ language on a global scale as well as to make the dictionary accessible to a wider audience. Some of that audience includes scholars, and therefore Birhoɽ is also rendered in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as well.

IPA is given next to every Birhoɽ word or phrase. The dictionary is trilingual because the community acknowledges the local dominance of Hindi and its primary role in the local educational system. Moreover, they felt that English should be included as it not only facilitates direct access to English for their community but they also believe that this sends the message to their own community and to the surrounding Indo-Aryan-speaking communities symbolically that their own language can be considered as a valid domain of inquiry, and promotes the notion that it is to be considered on an equal footing with this globally powerful language.