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Dialects and Varieties

Rajasthani

Other Dialects and Varieties

Rajasthani is a group of Western Indo-Aryan varieties spoken primarily in Rajasthan and the Malwa region, and in adjacent parts of Haryana, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India, as well as the Bahawalpur division of Pakistani Punjab and adjacent parts of Sindh. Migration by the Marwari community has carried Rajasthani speech to other parts of India, particularly the east and south, and it is also spoken to a lesser extent in Nepal. Within this atlas Rajasthani is treated as a dialect and variety of Hindi, though it is often classified by linguists as its own language group distinct from Hindi.

Facts
Region
Chiefly Rajasthan, also Gujarat, western Madhya Pradesh (Malwa and Nimar), Haryana and Punjab, plus the Bahawalpur division in Pakistan 1
Speaker Community
Standard Marwari serves as lingua franca of the Rajasthani people, spoken by over 25 million people as of 2011 1
Distinguishing Features
The term Rajasthani also denotes a literary language based mostly on Marwari 1
Classification
Variety Kind
Regional Dialect 1
Connections

Associated With

Hindi, Languages

Rajasthani's own article treats it as a distinct Western Indo-Aryan language cluster; its link to Hindi is an administrative census conflation, not a linguistic descent claim, so associated-with is used here rather than descends-from.

Source Wikipedia: Rajasthani Languages
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Rajasthani Languages
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Rajasthani languages Wikipedia article, Geographical distribution section, opening sentence
    Most of the Rajasthani languages are chiefly spoken in the state of Rajasthan, but are also spoken in Gujarat, Western Madhya Pradesh, i.e. Malwa, and Nimar, Haryana, and Punjab.
  • Rajasthani languages Wikipedia article, Speakers section, opening sentence
    Standard Rajasthani or Standard Marwari, a version of Rajasthani, is the common lingua franca of the Rajasthani people and is spoken by over 25 million people (2011) in different parts of Rajasthan.
  • Rajasthani languages Wikipedia article, lead section, closing sentence
    The term Rajasthani is also used to refer to a literary language mostly based on Marwari.
  • Variety kind, Rajasthani entity page
    Within this atlas Rajasthani is treated as a dialect and variety of Hindi, though it is often classified by linguists as its own language group distinct from Hindi.
  • Associated With: Hindi, Classification section
    However, they are controversially conflated with the Hindi languages of the Central-Zone in the Indian national census.
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