Sirmauri is a Western Pahari language spoken in the

Sirmaur district Sirmaur is the southernmost district of Himachal Pradesh, northern India. It is largely mountainous and rural, with 90% of its population living in villages. Some of its towns include the capital Nahan, Tuheri, Bhawan, Shamra, UchaTik ...

in the northern Indian state of

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 ...

. Its two main varieties are Dharthi (also called Giriwari) and Giripari.

Grammar

Postpositions

Script

The native script of the language is called Sirmauri script. This script is under proposal to be encoded in the Unicode. It is locally known as Dhankari. Pabuuchi was a script used by a class of astrologers.

Status

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. The language has no official status and is recorded as a dialect of Hindi. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is in the critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Sirmauri are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially. Earlier the language enjoyed some state patronage. After independence, everything changed due to the government favoring Hindi more. 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 strive to save the language. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having poor mutual intelligibility with it.

References

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