Halbi (also Bastari, Halba, Halvas, Halabi, Halvi) is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, transitional between Odia and

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

. It is spoken by at least 766,297 people across the central part of

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 ...

. The Mehari (or Mahari) dialect is mutually intelligible with the other dialects only with difficulty. There are an estimated 200,000 second-language speakers (as of 2001). In Chhattisgarh educated people are fluent in

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of North India, northern, Central India, centr ...

. Some first language speakers use

Bhatri Bhatri is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Bhottada tribe in Chhattisgarh and Odisha, India. The language is spoken predominantly in eastern Bastar district and in Koraput and Nabarangpur Nabarangpur is a town, villa city and a ...

as second language. Halbi is often used as a trade language, but there is a low literacy rate. It is written in the Odia and

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 a ...

scripts. It uses SOV word order (subject-object-verb), makes strong use of

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...

es, and places adjectives before nouns.

Phonology

Vowels

Halbi has 6 vowels: /a, e, ɘ, i, o, u/. All vowels show contrastive vowel nasalization.

Consonants

References

Eastern Indo-Aryan languages Languages of India {{IndoAryan-lang-stub