#dotyali

[aefensteorrra]

The Nepali Language - नेपाली

What is the language called in English and the language itself?  The language in English and the language itself is called Nepali.

Where is the language spoken?  Nepali is the official language in Nepal, one of the 22 scheduled languages in India and is also spoken in Bhutan. There are 129 different languages spoken in Nepal of which only 19 are spoken by more than 100,000 people.

How many speakers does the language have?  Nepali is spoken by 12.3 million people in Nepal, 2.9 million people in India and about 250,000 people in Bhutan.

Language family and closely related languages: Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language of the Eastern-Pahari subbranch. It is closely related to Jumli. Some other Northern Indo-Aryan languages Nepali is related to are: Kumaoni, Garhwali, Dotyali, Dogri and Kangri.

Writing system:  Nepali is written in Devanagari. It began to be written down around the 12th century.

Grammatical features: 

SOV language,

honorific system (low, medium, high) 

only animate words are gendered 

distinguishes between singular and plural but the plural is not mandatory if the context makes it clear that the speaker is speaking about more than one

(some, not all) adjectives decline for gender/number: sāno kitāb ‘small book’, sānā kalamharū ‘small pens’

uses post-positions: ko (genitive marker), lāī (dative marker), le (instrumental & ergative marker), mā (locative marker)

no gendered pronouns

highly inflected verbs: number, gender, status, person, tense, mood, aspect

Phonology:

Nepali has 11 distinct vowels (6 oral, 5 nasal):

- [õ] occurs sometimes but is just an allophone of /o/ - A process called h-deletion means that some vowels are pronounced as long vowels: पहाड (mountain) /pʌɦaɖ/ is realised as [paːɽ]

Natively, Nepali has 27 consonants, with some others occurring in loanwords:

- [j] and [w] are non-syllabic variants of /i/ and /u/ - [l] and [ɦ] occur as geminates between vowels - retroflex nasal [ɳ] is only used by some speakers in very few words (Essentially it seems this chart lists all possible sounds by all speakers, rather than a standard phonology).

You can listen to Nepali here

What do I find interesting about this language? I’m interested in quite a few Indo-Aryan languages in general as it’s such a large branch of the Indo-European family but I honestly haven’t read that much into them. I think Devanagari (and all of the Brahmic scripts) is beautiful and I love how Nepali sounds!

[nepal-photo-blog]

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