Chambeali ( Takri: ) is a language spoken in the

Chamba district Chamba is the northwestern district of Himachal Pradesh, in India, with its headquarters in Chamba town. The towns of Dalhousie, Khajjhiar and Churah Valley are popular hill stations and vacation spots for the people from the plains of nort ...

Himachal Pradesh Himachal Pradesh (; ; "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterized by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks ...

Classification

The Chambeali language is a part of the North-Western branch of the Indo-Aryan languages. It is further classified as a member of the Western-Pahari group. The language has a high degree of

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

with neighbouring

Pahari languages The Northern Indo-Aryan languages, also known as Pahāṛi languages, are a proposed group of Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the lower ranges of the Himalayas, from Nepal in the east, through the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhan ...

like Mandeali (83%).

Geographic distribution

Official status

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. Some speaker may even call it a dialect of Punjabi or

Dogri Dogri ( Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prad ...

. The language has no official status and is recorded as dialect of Hindi. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is of definitely endangered category, i.e. many Chambeali children are not learning Chambeali as their mother tongue any longer. Earlier the language got huge amount of state patronage. Everything changed since independence, due to favoritism towards Hindi by the Indian Government. The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari (Himachali)' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations are striving to save the language. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it and having a higher mutual intelligibility with other recognised languages like Dogri.

Dialects

There are three dialects of the language as follows: # Bansyari # Bansbari # Gadi Chambeali

Writing system

The native script of the language is

Takri script The Tākri script (Takri ( Chamba): ; Takri (Jammu/Dogra): ; sometimes called Tankri ) is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts. It is derived from the Sharada script formerly employed for Kashmiri. It is the sister scri ...

. The Chambeali version of Takri script has been encoded as the standard for Takri script under Unicode. This version resembles other version of the script. Chambi

Vocabulary

Name of months

Traditionally, the month formats is based on

Hindu calendar The Hindu calendar, Panchanga () or Panjika is one of various lunisolar calendars that are traditionally used in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, with further regional variations for social and Hindu religious purposes. They adopt a ...

References

{{Indo-Aryan languages Northern Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Himachal Pradesh Endangered languages of India