Bangani ( ''baṅgāṇī'') is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of Uttarkashi district in the west of the Garhwal region of

Uttarakhand Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; the official name until 2007), is a state in the northern part of India. It is often referred to as the "Devbhumi" (literally 'Land of the Gods') due to its religious significance and ...

, India. It has been described either as a member of the

Western Pahari The Western Pahari languages are a group of Northern Indo-Aryan languages that are spoken in the state of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir and parts of Uttarakhand and Punjab Languages The following lists the languages cla ...

language group, or as a dialect of the Central Pahari

Garhwali language Garhwali (, , in native pronunciation) is an Indo-Aryan language of the Central Pahari subgroup. It is primarily spoken by over 2.5 million Garhwali people in the Garhwal region of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalay ...

. It shares between one half and two thirds of its basic vocabulary with neighbouring varieties of

Garhwali Garhwali may refer to: * Garhwali people, an ethno-linguistic group who live in northern India * Garhwali language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by Garhwali people * anything from or related to: ** Garhwal division, a region in state of Uttarakh ...

and with the Western Pahari languages of

Jaunsari Jaunsari may refer to: * Jaunsari people, an ethnic group of northern India * Jaunsari language Jaunsari () is a Western Pahari language of northern India spoken by the Jaunsari people in the Chakrata and Kalsi blocks of Dehradun district in t ...

and

Sirmauri Sirmauri is a Western Pahari language spoken in the Sirmaur district 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 ...

Lexical similarity with neighbors

Centum substrate hypothesis

Bangani is of interest amongst scholars of

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

, due to some unusual features. Since the 1980s,

Claus Peter Zoller Claus Peter Zoller is a linguist and professor of South Asian Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo. His research interests include Hindi literature and Hindi, linguistics, the languages of the ...

– a scholar of Indian linguistics and literature – has claimed that there is a centum language

substrate Substrate may refer to: Physical layers *Substrate (biology), the natural environment in which an organism lives, or the surface or medium on which an organism grows or is attached ** Substrate (locomotion), the surface over which an organism lo ...

in Bangani. Zoller has also suggested that Bangani has been misclassified as a dialect of Garhwali and is more closely related to the Western Pahari languages. The substance of Zoller's claims has been rejected by

George van Driem George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute. Education * Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Grammar ...

and Suhnu Sharma, in publications since 1996, which claim that Zoller's data was flawed and that Bangani is an unambiguously satem language. Zoller does not accept the findings by van Driem and Sharma, and claims that there are methodological issues and factual errors in van Driem and Sharma's work. Support for Zoller's hypothesis and his underlying data has been offered by other linguists and Indologists, such as

Anvita Abbi Professor Anvita Abbi (born 9 January 1949) is an Indian linguist and scholar of minority languages, known for her studies on tribal languages and other minority languages of South Asia. In 2013, she was honoured with the Padma Shri, the fourth ...

, Hans Henrich Hock, and Koenraad Elst.See, for example, Koenraad Elst, 2007, ''Asterisk in Bhāropīyasthān: Minor Writings on the Aryan Invasion Debate'', Delhi, Voice of India, p. 31.

References

{{Reflist Northern Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Uttarakhand Indo-Aryan languages