Gondi (, ), natively known as Koitur (Kōī, Kōītōr, ), is a South-Central Dravidian language, spoken by about three million

Gondi people The Gondi (Gōṇḍī) or Gond people, who refer to themselves as "Kōītōr" (Kōī, Kōītōr), are an ethnolinguistic group in India. Their native language, Gondi language, Gondi, belongs to the Dravidian languages, Dravidian family. They ...

, chiefly in the

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

states State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh (; ; ) is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and the largest city is Indore, Indore. Other major cities includes Gwalior, Jabalpur, and Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, Sagar. Madhya Pradesh is the List of states and union te ...

Maharashtra Maharashtra () is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, the Indian states of Karnataka and Goa to the south, Telangana to th ...

Chhattisgarh Chhattisgarh (; ) is a landlocked States and union territories of India, state in Central India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, ninth largest state by area, and with a population of roughly 30 million, the List ...

Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (ISO 15919, ISO: , , AP) is a States and union territories of India, state on the East Coast of India, east coast of southern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, seventh-largest state and th ...

Telangana Telangana is a States and union territories of India, state in India situated in the Southern India, south-central part of the Indian subcontinent on the high Deccan Plateau. It is the List of states and union territories of India by area, ele ...

and by small minorities in neighbouring states. Although it is the language of the Gond people, it is highly endangered, with only one fifth of Gonds speaking the language. Gondi has a rich folk literature, examples of which are wedding songs and narrations.

are ethnically related to the

Telugus Telugu people (), also called Āndhras, are an ethno-linguistic group who speak the Telugu language and are native to the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Yanam district of Puducherry. They are the most populous of the four ...

. Gondi is the largest minor Dravidian language by number of speakers.

Endangerment

Although almost 13 million people returned themselves as Gonds on the 2011 census, however only 2.98 million recorded themselves as speakers of Gondi. In the present-day, large communities of Gondi speakers can be found in southeastern Madhya Pradesh ( Betul,

Chhindwara Chhindwara is a major city in India and a Municipal Corporation in the Chhindwara district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The city is the administrative headquarters of Chhindwara District. Chhindwara is reachable by rail or road fro ...

, Seoni, Balaghat,

Mandla Mandla is a city with municipality in Mandla district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It is the administrative headquarters of Mandla District. The city is situated in a loop of the Narmada River, which surrounds it on three sides, and ...

, Dindori and

Jabalpur Jabalpur, formerly Jubbulpore, is a city situated on the banks of Narmada River in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. It is the 3rd-largest urban agglomeration of the state and the 38th-largest of the country. Jabalpur is the administrative h ...

districts), eastern Maharashtra (

Amravati Amravati (/Marathi phonology, əmᵊɾɑʋᵊt̪iː/) is a city in Maharashtra located in the Vidarbha region. It is the ninth largest city in Maharashtra, India & second largest city in the Vidarbha region in terms of population. It is the ...

Nagpur Nagpur (; ISO 15919, ISO: ''Nāgapura'') is the second capital and third-largest city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is called the heart of India because of its central geographical location. It is the largest and most populated city i ...

, Yavatmal, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli and Gondia districts), northern Telangana (

Adilabad Adilabad, also known as Edlawada and Eddulapuram, is a city which serves as the headquarters of Adilabad district, in the Indian state of Telangana. Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, Lambadi and Gondi are the most spoken languages of Adilabad. Adilabad ...

, Komaram Bheem, and Bhadradi Kothagudem districts), Bastar division of Chhattisgarh and Nabarangpur district of

Odisha Odisha (), formerly Orissa (List of renamed places in India, the official name until 2011), is a States and union territories of India, state located in East India, Eastern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by ar ...

. This is the result of a language shift from Gondi to regional languages in the majority of the Gondi population, especially those in the northern portion of their range. By the 1920s, half of Gonds had stopped speaking the language entirely. The language is under severe stress from dominant languages such as

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

, Chhattisgarhi, Marathi and Odia due to their use in education and employment. In order to improve their situation, Gond households adopt the more prestigious dominant language and their children become monolingual in that language. Already in the 1970s, Gondi youth in places with increased contact with wider society had stopped speaking the language, seeing it as a relic of old times. The constant contact between speakers of Gondi and Indo-Aryan languages has resulted in massive Indo-Aryan borrowing in Gondi, found in vocabulary, grammar and syntax. In one survey in Anuppur district for instance, it was found the dialect of Gondi spoken there, known as ''dehati bhasha'' ('rural language'), was actually a mixture of Hindi and Chhattisgarhi rather than Gondi. However, the survey also found younger Gonds had a positive attitude towards speaking Gondi and saving the language from extinction. Another survey from areas throughout the Gond region found younger Gonds felt developing their mother tongue was less important, but there were still large numbers willing to help in its development. Some attempts at revitalization have included children's books and online videos.

Etymology

The origin of the name Gond, used by outsiders, is still uncertain. Some believe the word to derive from the Dravidian ''kond'', meaning hill, similar to the

Khonds Khonds (also spelt Kondha and Kandha) are an indigenous Dravidian tribal community in India. Traditionally , hunter-gatherers, they are divided into the hill-dwelling Khonds and plain-dwelling Khonds for census purposes, but the Khonds the ...

of Odisha. Another theory, according to Vol. 3 of the ''Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life'', is that the name was given to them by the

Mughal dynasty The Mughal dynasty () or the House of Babur (), was a Central Asian dynasty of Turco-Mongol tradition, Turco-Mongol origin that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from the early 16th to the 19th century. The dynasty was a cadet branch ...

of the 16th–18th centuries. It was the Mughals who first used the term "Gond", meaning "hill people", to refer to the group. The Gonds call themselves Koitur (Kōītōr) or Koi (Kōī), which also has no definitive origin.

Characteristics

Gondi has a two-gender system,

substantive In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example ...

s being either masculine or nonmasculine. Gondi has developed aspirated stops, distancing itself from its ancestor Proto-Dravidian.

Phonology

Consonants

* Sounds can be heard as alveo-palatal before non-front vowels in some dialects. * is realized as a retroflex sibilant before a retroflex stop . * An alveolar tap sound can vary freely with a trill sound . * is realized as a dental nasal before a dental stop sound, a palatal nasal before a palatal affricate, and a retroflex nasal before a retroflex stop. Elsewhere, it is articulated as an alveolar nasal . * is realized as an approximant when occurring before rounded vowels. *All consonants except /, , , / can occur either double or single in the medial position. * In south and southeastern Gondi dialects, the initial s is turning into h and getting deleted for some. * Hill-Maṛia dialect of Gondi has a uvular /ʁ/ which corresponds to the r̠ in other Dravidian languages or *t̠ from proto Dravidian and it contrasts with the alveolar r corresponding to proto-Dravidian *r.

Vowels

Morphology

Nouns

Gondi has derivative suffixes to denote gender for certain special words: ''-a:l'' and ''-o:r'' for masculine, and ''-a:r'' for feminine. Plural suffixes are also divided into masculine and feminine, ''-r'' is used for most masculine nouns, ''-ir'' ends masculine nouns ending in ''-e'', and ''-ur'' ends nouns ending in ''-o'' or ''-or''. For instance: ''kānḍī'' - boy ''kānḍīr'' - boys ''kallē'' - thief ''kallīr'' - thieves ''tottōr'' - ancestor ''tottūr'' - ancestors are all masculine. For non-masculine nouns, there are more suffixes: ''-n'', ''-ik'', ''-k'', and a null suffix ''-ɸ'' Before case markers are added, all nouns have an oblique marker. The oblique markers are ''-d-'', ''-t-'', ''-n-'', ''-ṭ-'', and -''ɸ''. For instance: ''kay-d-e'': "in the hand" Gondi has several case markers. Genitive case markers are ''-na'', ''-va'', ''-a''. * ''-na'' is used after ''na:r'', meaning village. ''-va'' is used after personal and reflexive pronouns. * ''-a'' is used elsewhere.

Sample text

The given sample text is Article 1 from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

English

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Northern Gondi

Romanisation (ISO 15919)

Sab māne kun gaurav aru adhikār nā māmlā tē janamjāt sutantartā aru barābar tā hak puṭtāla. Aven bhāyi lehkā māne māsi bevhār kiyānā ānda.

Dialects

Most of the Gondi dialects are still inadequately recorded and described. The more important dialects are Dorla, Koya, Madiya, Muria, and Raj Gond. Some basic phonologic features separate the northwestern dialects from the southeastern. One is the treatment of the original initial ''s'', which is preserved in northern and western Gondi, while farther to the south and east it has been changed to ''h''; in some other dialects it has been lost completely. Other dialectal variations in the Gondi language are the alteration of initial ''r'' with initial ''l'' and a change of ''e'' and ''o'' to ''a''. In 2015, the ISO 639 code for the "Southern Gondi language", "ggo", was deprecated and split into two codes, Aheri Gondi (esg) and Adilabad Gondi (wsg).

Writing

Gondi writing can be split into two categories: that using its own writing systems and that using writing systems also used for other languages. For lack of a widespread native script, Gondi is often written in

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

and

Telugu script Telugu script (), an abugida from the Brahmic family of scripts, is used to write the Telugu language, a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as several other neighbouring states. It is one ...

s. In 1928, Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram designed a native script based on Brahmi characters and in the same format of an Indian alphasyllabary. This script did not become widely used, although it is being encoded in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. Most Gonds remain illiterate. A native script that dates up to 1750 has been discovered by a group of researchers from the University of Hyderabad. It's usually named Gunjala Gondi Lipi, after the place where it was found. According to Maharashtra Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research Centre of India, a dozen

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s were found in this script. Programs to create awareness and promotion of this script among the

are in development stage. The Gunjala Gondi Lipi has witnessed a surge in prominence, and well-supported efforts are being undertaken in villages of northern

to widen its usage.