Korku (also known as ''Kurku,'' or ''Muwasi''
) is an
Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...
language spoken by the
Korku tribe of central
India
India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...
, in the states of
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital city, capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, Sagar, and Rewa, India, Rewa being the othe ...
and Maharashtra. It is isolated in the midst of the
Gondi people
The Gondi (Gōndi) or Gond or Koitur are a Dravidian ethno-linguistic group. They are one of the largest tribal groups in India. They are spread over the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra P ...
, who are
Dravidian, while its closest relatives are in eastern India. It is the westernmost Austroasiatic language.
Korkus are also closely associated with the
Nihali people, many of whom have traditionally lived in special quarters of Korku villages. Korku is spoken by around 700,000 people, mainly in four districts of southern
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital city, capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, Sagar, and Rewa, India, Rewa being the othe ...
(
Khandwa
Khandwa is a city and a nagar nigam in the Nimar region of Madhya Pradesh, India. It is the administrative headquarters of the Khandwa district, formerly known as East Nimar District.
Khandwa is a major railway junction; the Malwa line co ...
,
Harda
Harda is a town and a municipality in Harda district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Harda is the administrative headquarters of Harda.
History Mughal period
During the Mughal period, Harda was a mahal in the Handia sarkar. In 1742 ...
,
Betul,
Hoshangabad
Hoshangabad, officially known as Narmadapuram is a city and municipality in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It serves as the headquarters of both Hoshangabad district and Narmadapuram division. It is located in central India, on the sout ...
) and three districts of northern
Maharashtra
Maharashtra (; , abbr. MH or Maha) is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. Maharashtra is the second-most populous state in India and the second-most populous country sub ...
(Rajura and
Korpana
Korpana is a City (City council) and a tehsil in Rajura subdivision of Chandrapur district in Nagpur revenue Division in the Vidarbha region in the state of Maharashtra, India
India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a co ...
tahsil
A tehsil (, also known as tahsil, taluka, or taluk) is a local unit of administrative division in some countries of South Asia. It is a subdistrict of the area within a district including the designated populated place that serves as its administr ...
s of
Chandrapur district
Chandrapur district (Marathi pronunciation: ͡ʃən̪d̪ɾəpuːɾ (earlier known as ''Chanda district'') is a district in the Nagpur Division in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Chandrapur was the largest district in India until the Gadchir ...
, Manikgarh pahad area near
Gadchandur in
Chandrapur district
Chandrapur district (Marathi pronunciation: ͡ʃən̪d̪ɾəpuːɾ (earlier known as ''Chanda district'') is a district in the Nagpur Division in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Chandrapur was the largest district in India until the Gadchir ...
) (
Amravati
Amravati (pronunciation (help· info)) is the second largest city in the Vidarbha region and ninth largest city in Maharashtra, India. It is administrative headquarters of Amravati district and Amravati division which includes Akola, Buld ...
,
Buldana,
Akola
Akola () is a municipal corporation and the third largest city in Vidarbha after Nagpur and Amravati and tenth largest city in Maharashtra. is located about east of the state capital, Mumbai, and west of the second capital, Nagpur. Akola ...
).
The name Korku comes from ''Koro-ku'' (-''ku'' is the animate plural), ''Koro'' 'person, member of the Korku community' (Zide 2008).
Sociolinguistics
The
Indian national census of 2011 reported 727,133 people claiming to speak Korku, which is an
unscheduled language according to the Indian system. However, Korku is classified as “vulnerable” by
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
, the least concerning of the levels of
language endangerment
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
nonetheless.
Most adult men are bilingual in
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
, or multilingual in Hindi and the local Dravidian languages (Zide 2008: 156).
Literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in Writing, written form in some specific context of use. In other wo ...
in the language is
low
Low or LOW or lows, may refer to:
People
* Low (surname), listing people surnamed Low
Places
* Low, Quebec, Canada
* Low, Utah, United States
* Lo Wu station (MTR code LOW), Hong Kong; a rail station
* Salzburg Airport (ICAO airport code: LO ...
.
Throughout recent history, the use of the Korku language has been heavily influenced by larger hegemonic languages, especially Hindi. A few Korku-speaking groups have had relative success in increasing the viability of their dialect, specifically the Potharia Korku from the
Vindhya Mountains.
Dialects
Zide (2008:256) lists two
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
s for Korku, a Western and an Eastern one. The Western Dialect, which has a handful of subdialects is also called ''Korku.'' Among the Western varieties, the one spoken in Lahi is notable for its loss of the
dual number.
*Western (aka ''Korku'') dialect: spoken in the districts of
Melghat
Melghat was among the first nine tiger reserves of India to be notified in 1973 under Project Tiger. It is located at in the northern part of Amravati District of Maharashtra. Melghat Wildlife Sanctuary was declared as in 1985. The Tapti Ri ...
,
Betul-
Hoshangabad
Hoshangabad, officially known as Narmadapuram is a city and municipality in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It serves as the headquarters of both Hoshangabad district and Narmadapuram division. It is located in central India, on the sout ...
, and
Hoshangabad
Hoshangabad, officially known as Narmadapuram is a city and municipality in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It serves as the headquarters of both Hoshangabad district and Narmadapuram division. It is located in central India, on the sout ...
.
*Eastern (aka ''Muwasi/Mowasi/Mawasi'', or ''Kurku''): spoken in the
Chhindwara district of northeastern
Maharashtra
Maharashtra (; , abbr. MH or Maha) is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. Maharashtra is the second-most populous state in India and the second-most populous country sub ...
.
Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute f ...
lists four dialects for Korku:
* Ruma (Korku)
* Bondoy
* Bouriya
* Mawasi
Geographical Distribution
Korku is spoken in the following regions (Zide 2008:256):
*South-central
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital city, capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, Sagar, and Rewa, India, Rewa being the othe ...
**
East Nimar district (Khandwa district)
**
Betul district
**
Hoshangabad district
Narmadapuram district, formerly Hoshangabad district, is one of the districts of Madhya Pradesh state of India, and Narmadapuram city is the district headquarters.
Geography
The district has an area of 5408.23 km². Hoshangabad district is ...
**
Chhindwara district (Mawasi speakers)
*Northeastern
Maharashtra
Maharashtra (; , abbr. MH or Maha) is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. Maharashtra is the second-most populous state in India and the second-most populous country sub ...
**
Amravati district (majority of speakers in Maharashtra)
**
Buldana district
**
Akola district
Phonology
Vowels
Korku has 10
phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
s, which can occur short or long (e.g. /aː/), plus one mid vowel that only occurs as a short segment /ə/.
Consonants
Korku has a large
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
phoneme inventory,
in which stops occur in several places of articulation. Like many
languages of India
Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes known ...
, Korku stops distinguish between
voiced
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refe ...
, plain voiceless, and
voiceless aspirated consonants.
Word-finally, all stops are unreleased.
Morphosyntax
Korku is a highly
agglutinating
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...
,
suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
ing language. It has postpositions, a case system, a two-gender system, and three numbers. The verb phrase can be complex in Korku; functions that in English and other languages may be encoded in by the use of auxiliary verbs and of prepositions may be expressed in Korku through suffixation.
Word order
Korku, as all
Munda languages
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language famil ...
, shows a strict Subject-Object-Verb (
SOV)
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
.
Adjectives are expressed verbally - as intransitive verbs - with the exception of a few cases in which a separate word occurs before the noun they are modifying.
Morphology
Nouns in Korku are assigned one of two
grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
s:
animate, and inanimate, and inflect for several different
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomin ...
s.
Grammatical number
Korku distinguishes three
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...
s: singular, dual (two of X), and
plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This ...
(three or more of X) for nouns in the animate class. Nouns in the inanimate class are rarely marked for number.
Case system
In Korku, the function of participants in a sentence (e.g.
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
,
patient, etc) is expressed through grammatical case markings on nouns. Additionally, ideas that are expressed via
prepositions
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
in English (e.g. ''towards, from, with,'' etc.) are also expressed via case markings in Korku. The table below illustrates the different cases and the suffixes used to express them.
Additionally, Korku regularly marks direct object on the verb, as in other Munda languages.
In the sentence below, the suffix /eɟ/ on the verb compound /senɖawkʰen/ indicates that it was someone else who was given permission to go.
Pronouns
= Personal pronouns
=
Personal pronouns in Korku show different number and gender patterns depending on the person. The first person (“''I, we”'') distinguishes not only the three numbers but also whether the hearer is included (“''all of us”'') or excluded (“''us, but not you''”) in the communicative context. The second person (“''you, you all”'') only encodes number, whereas the third person (“''s/he, they”'') distinguishes gender, and number for animate nouns.
Demonstratives
In Korku, demonstratives (e.g. “''this, that, those”'') encode not only distance (e.g. ''“here and there”'') but also gender and number. Unlike English, which only distinguishes between a single proximal (this) and distal (that) spatial references, Korku demonstratives encode four levels of proximity to the speaker (i.e. ‘very close’ vs. ‘close’ vs. ‘far’ vs. ‘very far’), plus a fifth distinction, when one is pinpointing.
The table below illustrates the forms used in Korku.
Lexicon
Numerals
The basic cardinal numbers from 1 to 10 (transcribed in IPA) are:
Numbers after 11 are mainly of Indo-Aryan origin.
Kinship terms
As with many Austroasiatic languages, Korku has several words to refer to members of one's family, including the extended family and in-laws. There are often separate terms for people depending on their gender and seniority, for instance /bawan/ “wife's older brother” and /kosɾeʈ/ “elder brother's son”. In the tables below, words that include the suffix -/ʈe/ refer to someone else's family member, so that /kon/ means “my son”, whereas /konʈe/ is used when talking about someone else's son, for instance /ɖukriaʔ konʈe/ “the old woman's son”.
Korku has words to refer to pairs or groups of people in the family.
Writing system
The Korku language uses the
Balbodh style of the
Devanagari script, which is also used to write the
Marathi language
Marathi (; ''Marāṭhī'', ) is an Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken by Marathi people in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the official language of Maharashtra, and additional official language in the state of Goa. It is one o ...
.
References
Further reading
*Anderson, Gregory D. S. (ed.), ''The Munda languages.'' Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. .
*Nagaraja, K. S. (1999). ''Korku language: grammar, texts, and vocabulary''. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
*Zide, Norman H. (1963). ''Korku noun morphology''.
hicago: South Asian Languages Program, University of Chicago.
*Zide, Norman H. (1960). Korku verb morphology. [S.l: s.n.*Zide, Norman H. (2008). "Korku". In Gregory D. S. Anderson (ed.), ''The Munda languages'', 256–298. Routledge Language Family Series 3. New York: Routledge. .
External links
Ae... kalaavati... a korku songat YouTube.com
{{Austro-Asiatic languages
Munda languages
Endangered languages of India
Endangered Austroasiatic languages
Vulnerable languages