Nihali is a language isolate spoken by roughly 2,500 people in a handful of villages of the Buldhana district of Maharashtra, India, near the border with Madhya Pradesh, among an ethnic Nihali population of about 5,000. It has not been definitively connected to any of the surrounding South Asian language families, including Munda, Indo-Aryan or Dravidian, though a possible connection to Ainu has been suggested without confirmation. UNESCO classifies Nihali as critically endangered, and no monolingual speakers remain; the language's own name derives from a word meaning tiger.
Facts
Speaker CountAs of 2016, per the cited source; the entity own existing description gives a similar ethnic-population figure of about 5,000 Nihali. Proto-Language StatusLanguage isolate; no proto-language reconstructed, and no established relationship to any neighboring language family. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Nihali Language
Wikimedia FoundationLead section: location and speaker count
Nihali, also known as Nahali, is an endangered language isolate that is spoken in west-central India by approximately 2,500 people as of 2016.
Lead section: speaker count
Nihali, also known as Nahali, is an endangered language isolate that is spoken in west-central India by approximately 2,500 people as of 2016.
Lead section: classification
Nihali, also known as Nahali, is an endangered language isolate that is spoken in west-central India by approximately 2,500 people as of 2016.
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