Bhariati is an unclassified likely Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Patalkot Valley of

Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, and Rewa being the other major cities. Madhya Pradesh is the seco ...

in central India. It is not clear how many of the Bharia people of the 1981 census figure, who were spread out over several states outside the Patalkot Valley, speak the Bhariati language, or a form of Hindi. Not all Bharia people are Bhariati speakers, and the extent of the language has not been determined. Some Bhariati speakers also hold that it is not distinctive enough to be called a language independent of other Indic languages. Bhariati has mistakenly been described as "Bharia language" in some texts, however, Bharia describes the Bharia people rather than the language. This publication '' Ethnologue'' and the adjacent Bible translation organization SIL International have characterized the language as Dravidian, but this claim is unsubstantiated and the basis for it is unclear. Linguistic research on the language is scant to date, but it has been posited to be an Indo-Aryan language on the basis of similarities to Hindustani and other languages derived from

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

. The language has a number of cognate features to Hindustani, and incorporates loan words from it. Bhariati is primarily a spoken language which is rarely written, but writers who have used it have tended to use a

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

orthography as it has many phonetic features in common with other languages which use the script. The language is critically endangered.

References

{{reflist Unclassified languages of Asia Endangered languages of India