Malto
| Malto | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
India (regions: Jharkhand , West Bengal , Tripura , Orissa ) | |
| speaker | 224,926 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | - | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
dra |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
mjt |
|
Malto (also Kumarbhag Paharia , Sauria Paharia ) is a Dravidian language spoken in northern India . She belongs to the North Dravidian branch of this language family, so her closest relative is Kurukh . Malto is spoken by around 225,000 members of the Adivasi tribe of the same name, mainly in the Rajmahal Mountains in the north of the Indian state of Jharkhand , as well as in West Bengal , Tripura and Orissa .
As the language of the illiterate tribal population, Malto has no written tradition and therefore no standard variant. If Malto is written at all, it is done in Latin or Devanagari script . The language is divided into three main dialects: Sawriya, Malpaharia and Kumarbhag. The Malto speakers live extremely isolated in the impassable terrain of the Rajmahal mountain country, so that the outside world did not notice them until the end of the 18th century. The first records of the Malto language date from the 19th century.
literature
- Sanford B. Steever: Malto . In: Sanford B. Steever (Ed.): The Dravidian Languages . London: Routledge, 1998. pp. 359-387.