Santali language

Santali (Ol Chiki: ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱞᱤ) 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.

Writing system

Till the nineteenth century Santali remained an oral language and all collective traditional knowledge, history, stories, songs etc. were transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation. The interest of Europeans in the study of Indian languages led to the first efforts at documenting Santali language. Bengali and the Roman scripts were first used to write Santali before 1860s by European anthropologists, folklorists and missionaries like Campbell, Skrefsrud and Bodding. Their efforts resulted in Santali dictionaries, documentation and translations of collected folk tales, study of the basic morphology, syntax and phonetic structure of the language. At a later stage other Indian scripts like Devnagri and Oreya were used to write Santali. A recent development has been the creation of a separate Ol Chiki script for Santali by Pt. Raghunath Murmu (in the 1970s) which is used exclusively by the Santali speaking people of the Singhbhum Jharkhand and Odisha. There is no single script which is uniformly accepted by all Santals. Devnagri remains the script recognized for teaching learning of the language in Jharkhand, Bengali script in West Bengal. A major share of the original documented corpus as well as the most authentic and scientific research efforts are available in the Roman Script. Santali is written using Ol Chiki alphabet. It is also written in Oriya,Devanagari and Bengali based on the origin of the people. During the British rule it used to be written in Latin.