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 people (Uttar Pradesh), the Marathi people in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Mar ...

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

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. 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 Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

. Some first language speakers use Bhatri 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 ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

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. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...

es, and places adjectives before nouns.

Phonology

Vowels

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

Consonants

* /n/ is heard as a palatal �when preceding palatal affricates, and as retroflex �when before retroflex stops. * Voiced retroflex stops /ɖ, ɖʱ/ are heard as retroflex flaps �, ɽʱwhen in word-medial positions.

References

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