Ho
Another of the Kherwarian Munda languages, Ho [hoc] is spoken in two rather distinct varieties in southern Jharkhand and Northern Orissa (Mayurbhanj district). Despite having close to a million and a half speakers, Ho is doubly marginalized in the local mindset, firstly as a low-status tribal language, and secondly dismissed as a debased form of the already devalued Mundari language, to which it is a relatively close sister language.
Ho has been under investigation by Living Tongues since 2005, with K.C. Naik as the primary consultant. The initial recordings for the Ho Talking Dictionary and Online Grammar Project, now the Ho Living Dictionary, were made in 2007 with Chandra Mohan Haibru serving as the primary consultant. Both of these speakers represent the Mayurbhanj (Orissa) Ho dialect.
In 2008, Living Tongues Institute Fellow Anna Pucilowski traveled to Ranchi and Chaibasa to begin a full-scale documentation of Ho and made thousands of recordings in audio and video for the dictionary in the Jharkhandi dialect, assisted by Living Tongues Institute Fellow and Ho language activist Dr. Bhubaneswar Sawaiyan. Anna published her graduate dissertation on Ho in 2009, and the dictionary went online in 2010.
In 2023 Ho language activist Ganesh Birua rewrote the headwords of the Ho Living Dictionary in Warang Chiti, the script Ho speakers use in India.
Ho stories, told in Ho