The Bazigar, Goaar, or Guar, language is spoken by the

Bazigar Bazigar (from fa, بازیگر bazi + gar), or Goaars, are an ethnic group of north-western India. They are primarily found in Punjab and in Pakistan's Punjab, but there are also communities in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Chandigarh, Himachal ...

ethnic group of north-western India who are found primarily in

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising ...

, but also in

Haryana Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land ...

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders wi ...

Chandigarh Chandigarh () is a planned city in India. Chandigarh is bordered by the state of Punjab to the west and the south, and by the state of Haryana to the east. It constitutes the bulk of the Chandigarh Capital Region or Greater Chandigarh, which ...

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 peak ...

Jammu and Kashmir Jammu and Kashmir may refer to: * Kashmir, the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent * Jammu and Kashmir (union territory), a region administered by India as a union territory * Jammu and Kashmir (state), a region administere ...

and

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern s ...

. It is apparently an

Indo-Aryan language The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...

, even though Ethnologue classifies it as Dravidian, and

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 fo ...

has labelled it "unclassifiable". Schreffler argues that it compares well with the Western

Rajasthani dialects Rajasthani ( Devanagari: ) refers to a group of Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken primarily in the state of Rajasthan and adjacent areas of Haryana, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh in India. There are also speakers in the Pakistani pro ...

as well as with Punjabi (with which it is not mutually intelligible), while Deb notes its resemblance to Bagri.

Background

The Bazigar claim descent from the

Rajputs Rajput (from Sanskrit ''raja-putra'' 'son of a king') is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating from the Indian subcontinent. The term Ra ...

of Rajasthan and relate how they started spreading around the end of the 18th century. Initially nomadic and with a traditional occupation involving acrobatics and performance arts, they are now largely settled and mostly engaged in agricultural and other forms of labour.; . Several of the major Bazigar groups currently found in Indian Punjab migrated at the time of Partition in 1947 from Western Punjab (now in Pakistan), where they had started settling earlier in the century. The ethnic Bazigar are estimated at half a million in Punjab, but the language is not spoken by all. The younger generation are shifting to the regional languages, for example Schreffler reports that people younger than 30 prefer to use the regional language with one another, and speak Bazigar only with older people. The language is also known as ''Guar boli'', or ''goāroṅ ri bolī'' "Guars' speech", after the name that the community uses for itself. Bazigar has no written literature. Additionally, the Bazigar have an artificial secret language which they use when they do not want to be understood by outsiders. They call it ''Parsi'' or ''Pashto'' (not to be confused with the

Farsi Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and u ...

and

Pashto Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languag ...

languages).

Linguistic characteristics

Bazigar has an almost identical phonology to Punjabi except for the presence of the

voiceless palatal fricative The voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. It is the non-sibilant equiv ...

and the absence of the

voiceless glottal fricative The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition, and sometimes called the aspirate, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant '' phonologically'', bu ...

. Words with initial in Punjabi correspond to words with a tone in Bazigar. There are differences from Punjabi in the vocabulary and the morphology, notably in the absence of a vowel feminine ending (e.g. 'old woman'), and there are similarities to Hindi and Western Rajasthani, for example the

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

marker and the

dative In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jaco ...

marker .

References

Bibliography

* * * *

Background

Linguistic characteristics

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading