Journal | Bhasha
Journal issue | 3 | 2 | 2024
Research Article | A Brief Introduction to the Turi Language of Eastern India
A Brief Introduction to the Turi Language of Eastern India
Abstract
This article presents a brief introduction to the North Munda (Austro-Asiatic) language Turi, spoken by some 1,500 speakers throughout the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. After a brief introduction to the ethnic Turi group, we present a skeleton grammar of the Turi language as spoken in northwestern Odisha state, where it is still being learned by children as their home language. We then discuss the position of Turi within the Kherwarian (North Munda) group by comparing our lexical data for Turi with that for twelve other Kherwarian varieties as given in Kobayashi et al. (2003), using the software COG from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Our results suggest that Turi is a sister language to all of the dialects of Santali and that it together with these forms the Santali-Turi branch of Kherwarian. We end with a discussion of the possible consequences of these results for the linguistic and ethnic prehistory of eastern central India.
Submitted: Dec. 13, 2023 | Accepted: Sept. 15, 2024 | Published Dec. 18, 2024 | Language: en
Keywords Historical linguistics • Austro-Asiatic • Kherwarian • North Munda • Turi
Copyright © 2024 John Peterson, Abhay Sagar Minz, Linda Prabhat, Ariba Khan, Francis Xavier Kachhap, Gari Manish. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/bhasha/2785-5953/2024/02/005
