The Kharia language ( or ) is a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family, that is primarily spoken by the Kharia people of eastern India.
The first systematic description of the Kharia language is Banerjee (1894)'s Kharia grammar, followed by Tea Districts Labour Association (1929) and Floor et al. (1934), which resulted in a Kharia-English Dictionary. An ethnological study on the tribe was published in 1937 by Roy & Roy.
The first major academic approach to Kharia were taken by linguist Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow in the 1950s and 1960s with studies published in both German and English. Other works include Biligiri (1965)'s full study and lexicon; Mahapatra (1976) on Kharia and Juang verbs, Malhotra (1982) Ph.D. dissertation attempting a comprehensive grammar of Kharia; Abbi (1993; 1997) on language change and contact; Rehberg (2003) on Kharia phonology (in German).
Kharia belongs to the KhariaâÂÂJuang branch of the Munda language family. Its closest extant relative is the Juang language, but the relationship between Kharia and Juang is remote.
Kharia is in contact with Sadri (the local lingua franca), Mundari, Kurukh, Hindi, and Odia (in Odisha).
Kharia speakers are located in the following districts of India.
Gemination only occur in morpheme boundaries of words. Consonant length can be phonemic. Eg. /oton=na/ realized as [ÃÂtÃÂnÃÂÃÂ] (press=INF). /ÃÂ/, /s/, and /h/ may not be geminated.
Kharia NPs has three cases:
Grammatical gender is not a morphosyntactical feature of Kharia, but the language has independent words to identify whether a male or female of a lexical word is intended. Eg. kokro sià Âkoy 'rooster' and kitur sià Âkoy 'hen'.
Inalienable nominals are cross-referenced with possessive markers showed in the table below.
Kharia has two numeral systems. The one native to Kharia is no longer in common productive use, therefore having great disparities and disagreements. The other, which was borrowed from Sadri, is used in daily life.
The Sadri derived numerals often go with numeral classifiers. Classifiers occur very seldom with native numerals, at least by modern speakers, perhaps due to the unfamiliarity of the modern speakers with the Kharia numerals.
Similar to Remo, Gutob, GtaÃÂ, and recently Juang, Kharia predicate only marks person/number of the subject argument. Distinction between animate and inanimate agents is not so profound in Kharia as they are both marked, although Biligiri (1965) stated that "there is a stronger tendency to observe number agreement with an animate subject than with an inanimate subject."
Kharia, like many Munda languages, merges TAM categories with active and middle voices.
The causative derivation increases the valency of a verb stem by introducing a higher or superordinate agent who causes the lower agent to act or a non-agentive event to happen. In Kharia, the signature marker of the Austroasiatic family -(o)(ÃÂ)b- (including allomorphs) is used as the causative prefix or infix. Double causative constructions are also allowed.
The passive voice/reflexive in Kharia is realized as standalone word ÃÂom, itself has no lexical meaning. Historically, it might have stemmed from the verb dÃÂom ('to eat'), as it appears to cognate with Santali passive -jÃÂn (< jÃÂm 'to eat') and Sora-Juray reflexive/low transitive denoting marker -dÃÂm-.
There are two telic markers in Kharia which serve the narrative structure:
In Kharia, incorporation of nouns and adjuncts is possible but mostly limited to certain stems and under a lexicalized (non-productive) degree. Polysyllabic nominals are subtracted from their final syllable(s) while there are no phonological adjustments occurring on monosyllabic items. The incorporated compounds may obscure or alter the original meaning of the nominal or the verbal element.
1. (< tiÃÂ ('hand'))
2. (< soreà  ('stone'))