Sora language

Last updated
Sora
Savara
𑃐𑃚𑃝, ସଉରା
Sora language.png
'Sora' in Sorang Sompeng
Region India
Ethnicity Sora
Native speakers
409,549, 61% of ethnic population (2011 census) [1]
Austroasiatic
  • Munda
    • South
      • Sora-Gorum
        • Sora
Sora Sompeng, Odia, Latin, Telugu
Language codes
ISO 639-3 srb
Glottolog sora1254
ELP Sora

Sora is a south Munda language of the Austroasiatic language of the Sora people, an ethnic group of eastern India, mainly in the states of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Sora contains very little formal literature but has an abundance of folk tales and traditions. Most of the knowledge passed down from generation to generation is transmitted orally. Like many languages in eastern India, Sora is listed as 'vulnerable to extinction' by UNESCO. [2] Sora speakers are concentrated in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. The language is endangered as per as International Mother Language Institute (IMLI). [3]

Contents

Distribution

Speakers are concentrated mainly in Ganjam District, Gajapati District (central Gumma Hills region (Gumma Block), etc. [4] ), and Rayagada District, but are also found in adjacent areas such as Koraput and Phulbani districts; other communities exist in northern Andhra Pradesh (Vizianagaram District, Parvatipuram Manyam District and Srikakulam District).

History

The Sora language has faced a wavelike pattern of usage—that is, the number of people who speak Sora climbed steadily for decades before crashing down. In fact, the number of people who spoke Sora went from 157 thousand in 1901 to 166 thousand in 1911. [5] In 1921, this number marginally rose to 168 thousand and kept climbing. [5] In 1931, speaker numbers jumped to 194 thousand but in 1951, a period of exponential growth occurred, with speaker numbers jumping to 256 thousand. [5] in 1961, numbers topped at 265 thousand speakers before crashing down in 1971 when speaker numbers dropped back down to 221 thousand. [5]

Culture

Sora is spoken by the Sora people, who are a part of the Adivasi, or tribal people, in India, making Sora an Adivasi language. [6] Sora is found in close proximity to Odia and Telugu speaking peoples making a great deal of Sora people bilingual. [6] Sora does not have much in the way of literature except for a few songs and folk tales which are usually transmitted orally. [6] Sora religion is a mix of traditional shamanistic rituals and the surrounding Hinduism predominant in surrounding populations. [7] One particular Sora ritual has to do with death. Sora retains a unique shamanistic view on the subject of death. It is said that people who die from murders, suicides, or accidents are said to be taken, in a sense, by the Sun spirit. [7] These people, called usungdaijen, are then said to reside in the Sun itself after death. [7] Sora uses spirits to explain many phenomena. For example, if a girl in no relationship has a headache or a migrane, it is said that the Pangalsum spirit, or Bachelor Spirit who contains the souls of men who have died before wedlock, has placed a wreath of flowers tightly around the girls head as a symbol of claiming her as his wife. [7]

Phonology

On a similar note, our understanding of Sora phonology is limited at best but there are some generalizations that can be made. Most syllables are of the Consonant, Vowel, Consonant form and morphemes usually contain one to three syllables. [8] There are 18 identifiable consonants and they fall into most of the established origins of sound. Five consonants originate from the palate while only one consonant originates from the glottis. An interesting facet of Sora consonants is that they contain an inherent ɘ vowel. [9] Although vowels may be pronounced differently, there exist only six vowels in Sora. There are no diacritics and aspiration varies depending on the speaker. [9] It is likely that the influence of English, Odia, and Telugu has also affected vowel pronunciation over the course of Sora's use. [10] Pronunciations also change in prevocalic (occurring before a vowel) and non prevocalic environments. [9]

Consonants

  Bilabial Dental Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop voiceless p t c k ʔ
voiced b d ɟ ɡ
Fricative   s    
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ  
Flap   r ɽ    
Approximant   l j   

Vowels

Front Central Back
Close i ɨ u
Near-close ʊ
Mid e ə o
Open a

Grammar

Sora uses grammatical devices, including subject and object agreement, word order, and noun compounding to show case. It is seen as a predominantly nominative-accusative language and once again differs from most other languages with its lack of a passive structure. [11] However, just because Sora lacks a passive case does not mean other established forms of grammatical case are also missing. Rather, Sora has some complex grammatical cases. [11] A few examples are as follows: [11]

In addition, Sora, like many other Munda languages, uses relator nouns to link nouns with the other parts of the sentence in order to provide a more specific meaning, called compounding. [10] These monosyllabic nouns that enhance meaning are called Semantic relator nouns and are used widely in Sora. [11] Sora also has a combining form for every noun in addition to the full form of the noun. [12] The combining form allows the noun to be attached to a verb root to create a more semantically complex word, similar to compounding in other languages. [12] Sora contains prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to form its affixation but only uses its suffixes to change the possession of nouns. [10] The combining form is the form seen when the noun is being used with a verb or another full formed noun. [12] The full form is the form seen when the noun is standing alone or functioning not in tandem with other parts of speech. [12] Some templates of Sora combinations between nouns and verbs are as follows: [12]

Verb + Combined Form

Verb + Combined Form + Combined Form

Full Form + Combined Form

Full Form + Combined Form + Combined Form

An example of a Full Form noun shortened into the Combined Form is as follows: mənra, the Full Form of man, transform into the combined form word --mər . The two—indicate that a Noun (Full or Combined) or Verb has to precede the Combined Form noun; that is the Combined Form Noun can not stand on its own. [12] Although by no means conclusive, a few general guidelines about the Combined Form is that it depends on where the combination with the verb or other noun is to take place. [12] If the combined form is to an infix, then its resulting form will be different from if it were to be combined as a prefix. Some examples of Full Form Nouns and their Combined Forms are as follows: [12]

Full Form Combined Form English Translation

ədɘ'ŋ --dɘ'ŋ honeycomb

ərɘ'ŋ --rɘ'ŋ sour

bɘ'nra'j --bɘn flour

ba'ra' --bal gun barrel

kəṛíŋ—diŋ drum

Vocabulary

Sora borrows words from surrounding languages like Telugu and Oriya. [12] An example of a word borrowed from Oriya is kɘ'ra'ñja' which is a tree name. [12] From Telugu mu'nu', which means black gram, is borrowed. [12] Moreover, within the Munda family itself most words appear to be mutually intelligible owing to minor differences in pronunciations and phonology. Kharia and Korku, two other Munda languages, share mutually intelligible words with Sora. [11] For example, the number 11 in Kharia is ghol moŋ, in Korku it is gel ḑo miya, and in Sora it is gelmuy. [11] Each 11 in each language looks and sounds remarkably similar to the other 11's. This phenomenon is not just contained in numbers but rather a great deal of vocabulary is mutually intelligible among the Munda languages. Within the Austroasiatic language family more knowledge about Sora vocabulary can be found. The Mon-Khmer language family which encompasses the languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia has lexical cognates with the Munda family. [10] That means that some words found in Sora are of direct proto-Austroasiatic origin and share similarities with other derived Austroasiatic language families. [10] Words that relate to the body, family, home, field, as well as pronouns, demonstratives, and numerals are the ones with the most cognates. [10]

Numerals

The Sora numeral system uses a base 12, which only a few other languages in the world do. Ekari, for example, uses a base 60 system. [13] For example, 39 in Sora arithmetic would be thought of as (1 * 20) + 12 + 7. Here are the first 12 numerals in the Sora language : [13]

English: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve

Sora: aboy bago yagi unji monloy tudru gulji thamji tinji gelji gelmuy migel

Similar to how English uses the suffix from the numeral ten after twelve (such as thirteen, fourteen, etc.), Sora also uses a suffix assignment to numerals after 12 and before 20. Thirteen in Sora is expressed as migelboy (12+1), fourteen as migelbagu (12+2), etc. [13] Between numerals 20 and 99, Sora adds the suffix kuri to the first constituent of the numeral. For example, 31 is expressed as bokuri gelmuy and 90 as unjikuri gelji. [13]

The Sora number system was featured in a puzzle by Lera Boroditsky, found in the More Resources section associated with her "TED talk".

Writing systems

The Sora language is written using multiple systems. The Sora Sompeng script was developed in 1936 by Mangei Gomango as a native writing system created for the Sora language.

Sora is also written in the Latin script, in the Odia alphabet in Odisha, and in the Telugu script in Andhra Pradesh. [9]

Media coverage

Sora was one of the subjects of Ironbound Films' 2008 American documentary film The Linguists , in which two linguists attempted to document several moribund languages.

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Khmer language</span> Austroasiatic language of Cambodia

Khmer is an Austroasiatic language spoken natively by the Khmer people. This language is an official language and national language of Cambodia. The language is also widely spoken by Khmer people in Eastern Thailand and Isan, Thailand, also in Southeast and Mekong Delta of Vietnam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aleut language</span> Language of the Eskimo–Aleut language family

Aleut or Unangam Tunuu is the language spoken by the Aleut living in the Aleutian Islands, Pribilof Islands, Commander Islands, and the Alaska Peninsula. Aleut is the sole language in the Aleut branch of the Eskimo–Aleut language family. The Aleut language consists of three dialects, including Unalaska, Atka/Atkan, and Attu/Attuan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Munda languages</span> Austroasiatic languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent

The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Santali language</span> Language of South Asia

Santali, also known as Santal or Santhali, is the most widely-spoken language of the Munda subfamily of the Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal by Santals. It is a recognised regional language of India as per the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is spoken by around 7.6 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aslian languages</span> Subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family

The Aslian languages are the southernmost branch of Austroasiatic languages spoken on the Malay Peninsula. They are the languages of many of the Orang Asli, the aboriginal inhabitants of the peninsula. The total number of native speakers of Aslian languages is about fifty thousand and all are in danger of extinction. Aslian languages recognized by the Malaysian administration include Kensiu, Kintaq, Jahai, Minriq, Batek, Cheq Wong, Lanoh, Temiar, Semai, Jah Hut, Mah Meri, Semaq Beri, Semelai and Temoq.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comanche language</span> Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche people in the United States

Comanche is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche, who split from the Shoshone soon after the Comanche had acquired horses around 1705. The Comanche language and the Shoshoni language are quite similar, but certain consonant changes in Comanche have inhibited mutual intelligibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tsez language</span> Northeast Caucasian language

Tsez, also known as Dido, is a Northeast Caucasian language with about 15,000 speakers spoken by the Tsez, a Muslim people in the mountainous Tsunta District of southwestern Dagestan in Russia. The name is said to derive from the Tsez word for 'eagle', but this is most likely a folk etymology. The name Dido is derived from the Georgian word დიდი, meaning 'big'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Korku language</span> Mundu language spoken in Central India

Korku is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Korku people of central India, in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. It is isolated in the midst of the Gondi people, who are Dravidian, while its closest relatives are in eastern India. It is the westernmost Austroasiatic language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayuu language</span> Major Arawakan language spoken in the Guajira Peninsula

Wayuu, or Guajiro, is a major Arawakan language spoken by 400,000 indigenous Wayuu people in northwestern Venezuela and northeastern Colombia on the Guajira Peninsula and surrounding Lake Maracaibo.

Pohnpeian is a Micronesian language spoken as the indigenous language of the island of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands. Pohnpeian has approximately 30,000 (estimated) native speakers living in Pohnpei and its outlying atolls and islands with another 10,000-15,000 (estimated) living off island in parts of the US mainland, Hawaii and Guam. It is the second-most widely spoken native language of the Federated States of Micronesia the first being Chuukese.

Norman Herbert Zide was an American linguist and specialist in the Munda languages. Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He taught Hindi and Urdu at the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilization at the Department of Linguistics for four decades and published several books and articles on the subject. However, his greater fame lies in his contributions to the Munda languages and to Austroasiatic linguistics in general. He has also done considerable work as a translator, especially of poetry. In The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, he did or assisted in translations of poetry from both North Indian and Austroasiatic languages. His undergraduate education was at Columbia University where he majored in French. In the 1950s he began to do graduate work in South Asian languages and linguistics.

Lau, also known as Mala, is an Oceanic language spoken on northeast Malaita, in the Solomon Islands. In 1999, Lau had about 16,937 first-language speakers, with many second-language speakers through Malaitan communities in the Solomon Islands, especially in Honiara.

The Gtaʼ language, also known as Gta Asa, Didei or Didayi, is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Didayi people of southernmost Odisha in India.

Leti is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Leti in Maluku. Although it shares much vocabulary with the neighboring Luang language, it is marginally mutually intelligible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nihali language</span> Isolate language spoken in India

Nihali, also known as Nahali or erroneously as Kalto, is an endangered language isolate that is spoken in west-central India, with approximately 2,000 people in 1991 out of an ethnic population of 5,000. The Nihali tribal area is just south of the Tapti River, around the village of Tembi in Burhanpur district of Madhya Pradesh. Speakers of the Nihali language are also present in several villages of the Buldhana district in Maharashtra such as Jamod, Sonbardi, Kuvardev, Chalthana, Ambavara, Wasali, and Cicari. There are dialectal differences between the Kuvardev-Chalthana and the Jamod-Sonbardi varieties.

Mehek is a Tama language spoken by about 6300 people in a somewhat mountainous area along the southern base of the Torricelli Mountains in northwestern Papua New Guinea. Mehek is spoken in six villages of Sandaun Province: Nuku, Yiminum, Mansuku, Yifkindu, Wilwil, and Kafle. Mehek is most closely related to Pahi, with 51% lexical similarity, and spoken approximately 20 kilometers to the southwest. Mehek is a fairly typical Papuan language, being verb-final, having a relatively simple phonology, and agglutinative morphology. There is very little published information about Mehek. The literacy rate in Tok Pisin, spoken by nearly everyone, is 50-75%. Mehek is not written, so there is no literacy in Mehek. Tok Pisin is primarily used in the schools, with 50% children attending. There is also a sign language used by the large number of deaf people in the Mehek community.

Panará, also known as Kreen Akarore, is a Jê language spoken by the Panará people of Mato Grosso, Brazil. It is a direct descendant of Southern Kayapó. Although classified as a Northern Jê language in earlier scholarship, Panará differs considerably from the Northern Jê languages in its morphosyntax and has been argued to be a sister language to Northern Jê rather than a member of that group.

The Kwaio language, or Koio, is spoken in the centre of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands. It is spoken by about 13,000 people.

Konda-Dora, also known simply as Konda or Kubi, is a Dravidian language spoken in India. It is spoken by the scheduled tribe of the Konda-Dora, who mostly live in the districts of Vizianagaram, Srikakulam, and East Godavari in Andhra Pradesh, and the Koraput district in Odisha.

Mortlockese, also known as Mortlock or Nomoi, is a language that belongs to the Chuukic group of Micronesian languages in the Federated States of Micronesia spoken primarily in the Mortlock Islands. It is nearly intelligible with Satawalese, with an 18 percent intelligibility and an 82 percent lexical similarity, and Puluwatese, with a 75 percent intelligibility and an 83 percent lexical similarity. The language today has become mutually intelligible with Chuukese, though marked with a distinct Mortlockese accent. Linguistic patterns show that Mortlockese is converging with Chuukese since Mortlockese now has an 80 to 85 percent lexical similarity.

References

  1. ↑ "Statement 1: Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues - 2011". www.censusindia.gov.in. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. Retrieved 2018-07-07.
  2. ↑ "Sora". UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger. UNESCO . Retrieved 2018-03-18.
  3. ↑ দেশোয়ারা, মিন্টু (21 February 2022). "হারিয়ে যাচ্ছে সৌরা ভাষা". The Daily Star Bangla. Retrieved 21 February 2022.
  4. ↑ Anderson, Gregory D.S (ed). 2008. The Munda languages. Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. ISBN   0-415-32890-X.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Mahapatra, B.P. (1991). "Munda Languages in Census". Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute. 51/52: 329–336. JSTOR   42930411.
  6. 1 2 3 Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1971). "'Adivasi' Literatures of India: The Uncultivated 'Adivasi' Languages". Indian Literature. 14 (3): 5–42. JSTOR   23329913.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Vitebsky, Piers (1980). "Birth, Entity and Responsibility: The Spirit of the Sun in Sora Cosmology". L'Homme. 20 (1): 47–70. doi:10.3406/hom.1980.368026. JSTOR   25131601.
  8. ↑ Stampe, David L. (1965). "Recent Work in Munda Linguistics I". International Journal of American Linguistics. 31 (4): 332–341. doi:10.1086/464864. JSTOR   1264042. S2CID   224807949.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Sora Sompeng. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2017, from http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=script_detail&key=Sora
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Donegan, Patricia; Stampe, David (2002). South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence for the Analytic-to-Synthetic Drift of Munda. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics. pp. 111–120.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Starosta, Stanley (1976). "Case Forms and Case Relations in Sora". In Jenner, Philip N.; Thompson, Laurence C.; Starosta, Stanley (eds.). Austroasiatic Studies, Part 2. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications. University Press of Hawaii. pp. 1069–1107. ISBN   978-0-8248-0280-6. JSTOR   20019195. OCLC   6015240755.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Zide, Arlene R. K. (1976). Nominal Combining Forms in Sora and Gorum. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications. University of Hawai'i Press. pp. 1259–1294. JSTOR   20019202.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Mohan, Shailendra (2012). "Numeral Expressions in Kharia Korku, and Sora: A Comparative Account". Bulletin of the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute. 72/73: 367–374. JSTOR   43610713.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.