KeraɁ Mundari

About

KeraɁ Mundari is a variant of the Mundari language spoken by the Oraons in and around the city of Ranchi, the capital of the state of Jharkhand in India. Its name is said to be derived from the past suffix -kera, whereas other dialects have -keda. Due to being heavily understudied, there are only a few sources on this language, so all the information below comes from Kobayashi & Murmu 2008, the main piece of scholarly literature on KeraɁ Mundari. Although KeraɁ Mundari shares a large core vocabulary with other dialects of Mundari, it has a verbal morphology specifically unique to itself and significantly different from other varieties in terms of both derivation and inflection. More specifically, KeraɁ Mundari lacks infixation while having suffixes not used in any other Munda varieties. Kobayashi and Murmu hypothesize that this may be due to the influence of Kurux, the Oraons’ original language, belonging to the Dravidian language family. But from a grammatical standpoint, KeraɁ Mundari has very little in common with Kurux, and any commonalities show no definite evidence of Kurux influence. This notable dialect of Mundari emerged after the Oraons’ historical migration from the area between the Son and the Ganges due to an attack from invaders, causing them to move south of the North Koel river and into the Chota Nagpur plateau. Unlike the Oraons in the Gumla, Lohardaga, and Latehar districts who continue to actively use Kurux in daily life, those living in the Eastern Ranchi district have undergone a linguistic shift to Mundari, creating a markedly regional and ethnic dialect in the process. While it is difficult to precisely ascertain the number of KeraɁ Mundari speakers as the language has rarely been systematically described and the Census of India does not provide a separate entry for speakers of said dialect, we can estimate that the total number of KeraɁ Mundari speakers is no more than a third or fourth of the number of Mundari speakers in Jharkhand, which…