Hijra Farsi is a secret language spoken by South-Asian

Hijra Hijra, Hijrah, Hegira, Hejira, Hijrat or Hijri may refer to: Islam * Hijrah (also ''Hejira'' or ''Hegira''), the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE * Migration to Abyssinia or First Hegira, of Muhammad's followers in 615 CE * L ...

and Kothi (also Koti) communities. Hijras are a marginalized

transgender A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were sex assignment, assigned at birth. The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes perso ...

community that lives in sequestered groups in many cities of India and Pakistan. The language, also known as ''Koti Farsi'', is spoken by the Hijra community throughout Pakistan and North India. Despite what its name suggests, the language is based on Hindustani rather than

Farsi Persian ( ), also known by its endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), 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 spoke ...

. The sentence structure is similar to

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

, but noticeable distinctions exist.Sheeraz, Muhammad, and Ayaz Afsar. "Farsi: An Invisible But Loaded Weapon for the Emerging Hijraism in Pakistan." Kashmir Journal of Language Research 14, no. 2 (2011). Hijra Farsi is mainly spoken by Muslim Hijras; Hindu Hijras speak the Gupti language and its regional dialects. Even though the language is not actually based on Persian (Farsi), the hijras consider the language to be related to the language of the

Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an Early modern period, early modern empire in South Asia. At its peak, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to ...

, which they associate with the origin of Hijra identity. Hijra Farsi is most similar to Hindi, but is not intelligible to Hindi speakers due to distinctive intonation and a large amount of distinctive vocabulary. After the partition of India, the language has come to include words of local languages including Punjabi, Saraiki, Sindhi and other languages.

History

Hijra Farsi has no documented history, but linguist and anthropologist Kira Hall has found indications of its existence from the early 1800s. Hijras enjoyed a high status during the Mughal empire, which may be the reason why the language is named after 'Farsi' despite its dissimilarity with Persian. With the fall of the Mughal empire and start of British colonial rule, eunuchs were pushed into a more marginalized position. Colonial laws criminalized their choice of dress, as well as the public dancing they regularly engaged in. The crackdown caused hijras to become protective of their language, which then evolved into a survival tool. That the language is still in use may have to do with the fact that the community continues to be persecuted in independent India. "Seventy-four percent of the Hijra community has suffered violence and harassment,” says Simran Shaikh, who works with Alliance India, an NGO that works on AIDS prevention.

Community-building tool

Hijra Farsi began and has continued as a learned, as opposed to a mother, tongue. The language is introduced to newcomers when they enter the hijra community, together with the group’s alternative family structure, cultural norms, and other traditions. Having a language that creates a sense of a community is a necessity for hijras, who typically give up a great deal when they join the community. Hijras see the language as something that is truly theirs, and speak about it with pride.

Examples

The following examples are adapted from Awan & Sheeraz (2011), who researched Hijra Farsi in the communities within

Dera Ghazi Khan Dera Ghazi Khan, abbreviated as D.G. Khan, is a city in the southwestern part of the Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab province of Pakistan. It is the List of cities in Punjab, Pakistan by population, 16th most-populous city in Punjab and List of most p ...

and

Rawalpindi Rawalpindi is the List of cities in Punjab, Pakistan by population, third-largest city in the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is a commercial and industrial hub, being the list of cities in P ...

. Note that the transcriptions are taken directly from the text, which does not specify a distinction between

retroflex A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

and dental plosives, nor does it consistently mark a distinction between /ɐ/ and /ɑ/. They do, however, mention that /ɽ/ is a very common sound used in Hijra Farsi, especially compared to its frequency in other languages in contact.

Nouns

:This refers to the

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

of the noun in Hijra Farsi Many of these words are completely dissimilar to any of the locally spoken languages, but the pluralization strategies remain identical to those of

, i.e. nouns ending in what is transcribed here as -i are made plural by adding -an (/-i/ becomes /-ijɑ̃/), and nouns ending in -a replace the ending with plural suffix -e (/-ɑ/ becomes /-e/).

Verbs

Awan & Sheeraz also give examples of verbs: These verbs are given with the -na infinitival suffix, but that is only representative of the Rawalpindi variety: Awan and Sheeraz report that -anɽ endings are found specifically in the Dera Ghazi Khan variety, attributing it to the fact that Saraiki is more widely spoken there. Another such example is given with the feminine singular habitual form of the verb meaning "to do/make": whereas in Rawalpindi ''kerdi'' is used, demonstrating greater influence from Punjabi ''kerdi'', Dera Ghazi Khan Hijra Farsi uses ''krendi'', which resembles the Saraiki ''krendi''.

Function words

In addition to content words, Hijra Farsi demonstrates innovation (i.e. divergence from related languages) in some

function words In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speak ...

. Namely, in

Lucknow Lucknow () is the List of state and union territory capitals in India, capital and the largest city of the List of state and union territory capitals in India, Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and it is the administrative headquarters of the epon ...

, Nagar (2008) found the pronouns ''humsio'' ("I", 1st person), ''tumsio'' ("you", 2nd person), and ''ojo'' ("he/she", 3rd person), and the augmentative ''adiyal'' ("very"). The

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

of these pronouns is unclear in Nagar's thesis. In Rawalpindi and Dera Ghazi Khan, Awan and Sheeraz found ''hamala'' to be the 1st person pronoun, with ''tamala'' as the 2nd person. In addition to pronouns, there is innovation in

demonstratives Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning depending on a particular frame ...

: unlike surrounding languages, there is no proximal/distal distinction, and unlike surrounding languages, there ''is'' a gender distinction: ''insa'' for masculine and ''insi'' for feminine, both using productive plural morphology such that masculine "these" will be ''inse'' and feminine "these" will be ''insian'' (as transcribed by Awan & Sheeraz).

Numbers

Hijra Farsi's counting system, used specifically for counting money, uses lexemes unique to the cant: : Awan & Sheeraz list this number as one hundred thousand, and Kundalia lists it as ten thousand.