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Santali is a language in the Munda subfamily of Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari.
It is spoken by around 6.2 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, although most of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Tripura, and West Bengal.[2]
The following brief grammatical sketch is based on Ghosh 2008. It does not purport to give a full account of the language's grammar but rather give an impression of the structure of the language.
Santali has 21 consonants, not counting the 10 aspirated stops which occur almost only in Indo-Aryan loanwords and are given in parentheses in the table below.
In native words, the opposition between voiceless and voiced stops is neutralized in word-final position. A typical Munda feature is that word-final stops are "checked", i. e. glottalized and unreleased.
Santali has eight non-nasal and six nasal vowels.
There are numerous diphthongs.
Santali, like all Munda languages, is a suffixing agglutinating language.
Three numbers are distinguished, singular, dual and plural.
The case suffix follows the number suffix. The following cases are distinguished:
Santali has possessive suffixes which are only used with kinship terms: 1st person -ɲ, 2nd person -m, 3rd person -t. The suffixes do not distinguish possessor number.
The personal pronouns in Santali distinguish inclusive and exclusive first person and anaphoric and demonstrative third person.
The interrogative pronouns have different form for animate ('who?') and inanimate ('what?'), and referential ('which?') vs. non-referential.
The indefinite pronouns are:
The demonstratives distinguish three degrees of deixis (proximate, distal, remote) and simple ('this', 'that', etc.) and particulate ('just this', 'just that') forms.
The basic cardinal numbers are:
The numerals are used with numeral classifiers. Distributive numerals are formed by reduplicating the first consonant and vowel, e.g. babar 'two each'.
Verbs in Santali inflect for tense, aspect and mood, voice and the person and number of the subject.
Transitive verbs with pronominal objects take infixed object markers.
Santali is an SOV language, though topics can be fronted.
A great recognition of Santali was reached in December 2013 when the University Grants Commission of India decided to introduce the language in the National Eligibility Test to prepare future lecturers for the language in colleges and universities.[3]
Indian English, Gujarati language, Kannada language, Kashmiri language, Nepali language