Kurukh ( or ; Devanagari: à ¤Âà ¥Âà ¤Âà ¤¡à ¤¼à ¥Âà ¤Âà ¤¼, ), also Kurux, Oraon or Uranw (Devanagari: à ¤Âà ¤°à ¤¾à ¤Âà ¤µ, ), is a North Dravidian language spoken by the Kurukh (Oraon) and Kisan people of East India. It is spoken by about two million people in the Indian states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, as well as by 65,000 in northern Bangladesh, 28,600 of a dialect called Uranw in Nepal and about 5,000 in Bhutan. The most closely related language to Kurukh is Malto; together with Brahui, all three languages form the North Dravidian branch of the Dravidian language family. It is marked as being in a "vulnerable" state in UNESCO's list of endangered languages. The Kisan dialect has 206,100 speakers as of 2011.
According to Edward Tuite Dalton, "Oraon" is an exonym assigned by neighbouring Munda people, meaning "to roam". They call themselves Kurukh. According to Sten Konow, Uraon will mean man as in the Dravidian Kurukh language, the word Urapai, Urapo and Urang means Man. The word Kurukh may be derived from the word Kur or Kurcana means "shout" and "stammer". So Kurukh will mean 'a speaker'.
Kurukh belongs to the Northern Dravidian group of the Dravidian family languages, and is closely related to Sauria Paharia and Kumarbhag Paharia, which are often together referred to as Malto.
Kurukh is written in Devanagari, a script also used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and other Indo-Aryan languages.
In 1991, Basudev Ram Khalkho from Odisha released the Kurukh Banna script. In Sundargarh district of Odisha the Kurukh Banna alphabet is taught and promoted by Kurukh Parha. Fonts have been developed and people are using it widely in books, magazines and other material. The alphabet is also used by Oraon people in the states of Chhattisgarh, Bengal, Jharkhand and Assam.
In 1999, Narayan Oraon, a doctor, invented the alphabetic Tolong Siki script specifically for Kurukh. Many books and magazines have been published in Tolong Siki script, and it saw official recognition by the state of Jharkhand in 2007. The Kurukh Literary Society of India has been instrumental in spreading the Tolong Siki script for Kurukh literature.
In India, Kurukh is mostly spoken in Raigarh, Surguja, Jashpur of Chhattisgarh, Gumla, Ranchi, Lohardaga, Latehar, Simdega of Jharkhand; Jharsuguda, Sundargarh and Sambalpur district of Odisha.
It is also spoken in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura states by Kurukh who are mostly Tea-garden workers.
It is spoken by 2,053,000 people from the Oraon and Kisan tribes, with 1,834,000 and 219,000 speakers respectively. The literacy rate is 23% in Oraon and 17% in Kisan. Despite the large number of speakers, the language is considered to be endangered. The governments of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have introduced the Kurukh language in schools with majority Kurukhar students. Jharkhand and West Bengal both list Kurukh as an official language of their respective states. Bangladesh also has some speakers.
The phonology of True Kurukh represents the language in its native Dravidian state. It is defined by a strict absence of native aspirated consonants and a system where voicing in stops is an allophonic process rather than a phonemic distinction.
In standard spoken Kurukh, aspirated stops like , , and are common due to centuries of contact with Nagpuri and Hindi. In True Kurukh, these are recognized as non-native. The revival process replaces these imports with their unaspirated equivalents or native fricatives (like the velar ), effectively restoring the Dravidian "hardness" of the tongue.
Perhaps the most significant shift is the status of voiced stops (b, d, á¸Â, g). In Indo-Aryanized Kurukh, these are independent phonemes. In Native True Kurukh, voicing is purely environmental. A stop is generally voiceless at the beginning of a word but becomes voiced intervocalically (between vowels). This "Lenition" rule simplifies the phonemic inventory while adding a melodic, fluid quality to spoken sentences.
Revived Kurukh places heavy emphasis on its liquid (rhotic and lateral) distinctions:
The revival enforces native syllable structures, largely preferring Consonant-Vowel (CV) patterns and strictly governing consonant clusters. This "refining" removes the heavy, cluster-laden phonology of borrowed Sanskritized terms, opting instead for the rhythmic, agglutinative flow native to the Kurukh people.
The pronominal system of Kurukh (Oraon) exhibits a sophisticated morphological structure based on long-vowel stems and nasal augmentation. While the personal pronouns follow established standard rules of clusivity, the third-person system is currently the subject of linguistic innovation regarding gender categorization.
Personal pronouns distinguish between singular (-n) and plural (-m) forms. A defining feature is the distinction between **Exclusive** (excluding the listener) and **Inclusive** (including the listener) 1st-person plural forms. Notably, the inclusive form (*nÃÂm*) represents a collective identity; therefore, no singular form exists for the inclusive 1st person.
The third-person pronominal system is fundamentally deictic, mapping grammatical referents onto physical space (Proximal, Medial, and Distal). Historically and in contemporary usage, Kurukh utilizes a Binary Gender System, though a new proposal (2026) suggests a transition to a Ternary Gender System.
The existing standard in Kurukh categorizes all referents into two groups:
This linguistic innovation proposes splitting the "Non-Masculine" category to create a three-way distinction. This is achieved by introducing a specific Feminine Definite Marker (suffix *-ḷ) to distinguish female persons from the Neuter category. This suffix is morphologically derived from the Kurukh terms peḷ or peḷḷà Â, meaning "woman" or "girl," effectively distilling the semantic essence of female personhood into a functional grammatical marker.
In Kurukh, grammatical cases are formed by appending suffixes to the Oblique Stem of the pronoun. The genitive system utilizes a stable pronominal suffix alongside person-specific attributive suffixes.
The Genitive-Attributive category (used when the pronoun modifies a noun) exhibits a categorical split based on the person of the referent:
Kurukh, like other Dravidian languages, is an agglutinative language. The sentence structure is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). In its morphological construction, there is suffixation but there are no infixes or prefixes.
Kurukh nouns have three grammatical genders, namely masculine, feminine and neuter. To the Kurukh only men are masculine; women and goddesses (evil spirits) are feminine; all others are neutral. Masculine nouns of the third person singular have two forms, the indefinite and the definite. The indefinite is the simplest form of the noun, thus ÃÂl man. The definite form is made by adding -as for the singular, thus ÃÂlas, ("the man").
There are only two grammatical numbers, the singular and the plural.
The following is an example declension table for a masculine noun "ÃÂl", meaning "man"
The feminine declension is almost identical to the masculine, but lacks a definite form. The following example is for "mukkÃÂ" ("woman").
The neuter declension for "allÃÂ" ("dog") shows almost identical singular forms, but a difference in pluralization.
The Kurukh language is taught as a subject in the schools of Jharkhand, Chhattishgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and Assam.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Hà ÂrmàÃÂlÃÂrin hak gahi bÃÂre nà « mallintàazÃÂdi aràaá¹ á¹ÂÃÂm mannàgahi haq xakharki raë. ÃÂrin lur aràjiyàgahi dav bausàxakhakë raë aràtamhai majhi nà « mÃÂl-prÃÂm gahi bÃÂvhÃÂr nannànàcahi.
Kurukh has a number of alternative names such as Uraon, Kurux, Kunrukh, Kunna, Urang, Morva, and Birhor. Two dialects, Oraon and Kisan, have 73% intelligibility between them. Oraon but not Kisan is currently being standardised. Kisan is currently endangered, with a decline rate of 12.3% from 1991 to 2001.