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 is 667,872. In light of this, KeraɁ Mundari employs low recognition even from the Oraons themselves, and due to the absorption of Oraon villages by growing suburbs in Ranchi, KeraɁ Mundari may be phased out in only a couple of generations. For this reason, it is plausible to suggest that this variety of Mundari is endangered.

Aside from its uniqueness in terms of status, KeraɁ Mundari shares the same vowels as the HasadaɁ dialect: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. Beyond these five phonemes, KeraɁ Mundari also exhibits nasalized vowels found in Munda words and in loanwords from Indo-Aryan languages. Moreover, in terms of consonants, the ones in KeraɁ Mundari are nearly identical to their counterparts in HasadaɁ except for the checked palatal stop. In contrast, KeraɁ Mundari retains an archaism (also found in Naguri Mundari) - the intervocalic /h/ as seen in the word for flower ‘baha’, whereas in HasadaɁ the equivalent word would be ‘baa.’

In terms of phonotactics, KeraɁ Mundari typically has simple syllable structures such as (C)V and (C)VC, where vowels in monosyllabic words are generally lengthened. Word stress is nondistinctive, and there are no signs of sentential stress other than a rising tone at the end of yes-no questions. Morpho-phonological elements of KeraɁ Mundari include a morpheme-final /n/ that is sometimes deleted when followed by /Ɂ/ and a lack of vowel harmony except in a few lexicalized words such as kuri ‘girl’ and kora ‘boy.’

Going back to similarities to HasadaɁ, KeraɁ Mundari has three numbers: singular (unmarked), dual (-kin), and plural (-kul-ko) but the number often remains unattached from the noun, particularly when the quantity is already expressed elsewhere with numerals, as in examples like ‘three sons’ and ‘two dogs.’ Moreover, plural suffixes are not used to refer to multiple non-human entities.

In addition to numbers, the language makes use of suffixes and postpositions to mark case with overlapping functions and forms such as -raʔ, -re, and -loŋ. In comparison, an element that does not have any grammatical distinction is gender, as Mundari does not typically mark the differences between genders (except in loans from Indo-Aryan). In particular, in HasadaɁ, there is a third-person-singular personal pronoun aeʔ meaning he/she. In comparison, KeraɁ Mundari never makes use of aeʔ and instead opts into using demonstrative pronouns niʔ ‘this one’, ini(ʔ) ‘that one’, ini hoɽo ‘that person’, and so on. This grammatical difference could be due to influence from Indo-Aryan languages such as Sadani or the Oraons’ original language, Kurux, both of which use demonstratives as pronouns.

These morphological features also complement KeraɁ Mundari’s syntax, where in simple sentences the verb typically comes at the end of the sentence, demonstrating that there is SOV word order. In complex sentences, a similar pattern normally follows, but the main clause of a sentence comes first. Regardless of whether or not the sentence is simple or complex, a question marker iciɁam can mark yes-no questions.

This dictionary contains audio recordings by KeraɁ Mundari speakers Kamlesh Tirkey and Magan Tirkey. The data was compiled by Gregory D. S. Anderson with technical assistance from Anna Luisa Daigneault, Jacob Bowdoin, and Diego Córdova Nieto. This description was created by Living Tongues intern Alex Mussomeli.

Bibliography:

Kobayashi, Masato & Ganesh Murmu. 2008. Keraʔ Mundari. In Anderson, Gregory D. S. (ed.), The Munda languages, 165-194. London & New York: Routledge.