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Chapter 3: The Tongue and Its Many Voices
In the village of Jaugada, about thirty kilometres from modern-day Berhampur in southern Odisha, there is a rock. It is not a particularly dramatic rock --- not a cliff face or a cave wall, just a large outcrop of stone on a low hill overlooking the Rushikulya River. But carved into its surface, in the precise, angular strokes of third-century BCE Brahmi script, is an edict of Emperor Ashoka --- addressed to the administrators of Kalinga, instructing them on the principles of dharma and the duties of governance. The language is Prakrit. The script is Brahmi. And the place is the southern edge of what would, over the next two thousand years, slowly crystallize into the linguistic territory of a language called Odia.
Stand at Jaugada and then drive five hours northwest to the Udayagiri-Khandagiri caves near Bhubaneswar, where King Kharavela of Kalinga left his own inscription --- the Hathigumpha inscription, seventeen lines of Prakrit carved into stone sometime in the first or second century BCE, recounting his military campaigns, his patronage of Jain monks, his irrigation works. The script is still Brahmi. The language is still Prakrit. But the Prakrit of Kharavela’s inscription carries lexical and phonological traces that linguists have identified as distinctly eastern --- features that would, over centuries of slow divergence, become the hallmarks of the languages that emerged along the eastern coast of the subcontinent: Bengali, Assamese, and Odia.
Now fast-forward a thousand years. In the Kalinga inscriptions of the early Eastern Ganga dynasty, dated to around 1051 CE, the language is no longer Prakrit. It is recognizably Odia --- Old Odia, marked by distinct grammar, vocabulary, and syntax that separate it from its siblings to the north. And the script is no longer the angular Brahmi of Ashoka’s stone. It has curved. Every letter has softened into arcs and loops, as though the alphabet itself has been reshaped by water. Which, in a sense, it has --- reshaped not by water but by the leaf on which it was written.
The story of the Odia language is the story of this slow becoming: from an undifferentiated stream of eastern Prakrit shared with Bengali and Assamese, through centuries of gradual separation, into a language with its own script, its own literature, its own fierce insistence on existing. It is also the story of what happens underneath any language --- the dialects that the standard form tries to absorb, the tribal tongues that the state language tries to replace, and the politics of who gets to decide what counts as a “real” language in the first place.
The Root: Where Odia Comes From
Every language has a family tree, and Odia’s is tangled in the way that family trees of closely related siblings always are. Odia is an Indo-Aryan language, which means it belongs to the same vast linguistic family as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, and most of the major languages of northern and central India. All Indo-Aryan languages descend, ultimately, from Sanskrit --- or more precisely, from the Prakrits, the vernacular spoken languages that existed alongside Sanskrit and gradually replaced it as the medium of everyday life.
The specific Prakrit that gave birth to Odia was Magadhi Prakrit --- the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha, centered in what is now Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Magadhi Prakrit was the language in which the Buddha likely preached (or something very close to it), and it was the language of the Mauryan court. Its literary offshoot, Ardha-Magadhi, was the liturgical language of early Jainism and the medium of some of the earliest Jain texts.
Over centuries, Magadhi Prakrit split into regional varieties. The eastern varieties --- spoken in Bengal, Assam, and the Kalinga-Odra region --- formed a cluster that linguists call the Eastern Magadhi group, or sometimes the Magadhan sub-branch of Indo-Aryan. From this cluster, three major languages eventually emerged: Bengali, Assamese, and Odia. They are, linguistically speaking, siblings --- born from the same parent, separated by geography and political history into distinct identities.
The separation was gradual. Proto-Odia --- the transitional stage between Prakrit and what we would recognize as Old Odia --- begins appearing in inscriptions from around the seventh to ninth centuries CE, often in hybrid form, with Sanskrit and Prakrit words mixed with emerging Odia vocabulary and grammatical forms. The Udayagiri cave inscriptions from this period show this transition in progress: Prakrit is giving way, letter by letter, word by word, to something new. By the time of the Urajam inscription of 1051 CE, the separation is complete. This is Old Odia --- unmistakably its own language, with its own verb forms, its own pronouns, its own way of organizing a sentence.
What makes this divergence linguistically interesting is what Odia retained and what it discarded. Like Bengali and Assamese, Odia merged the three sibilant sounds of Sanskrit (sha, shha, sa) into a single fricative --- sa in Odia, sha in Bengali, kha (a velar fricative) in Assamese. This is a shared inheritance from their common Magadhi ancestor. But unlike Bengali, Odia retained the pronunciation of final vowels. The Odia word for “flower” is phula (ଫୁଲ), with the final a clearly sounded; the Bengali equivalent is phul, with the vowel dropped. This retention of the inherent vowel --- the schwa --- at both medial and final positions is one of Odia’s most distinctive phonological features, one it shares with Sanskrit but that most other modern Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi and Bengali, have abandoned. It gives the language a particular cadence, a rhythmic quality that native speakers recognize instantly.
Odia also preserved the voiced retroflex lateral approximant --- a sound produced by curling the tongue backward and letting the air flow around the sides, transcribed as /ɭ/. Among the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, this is almost unique to Odia. It is one of the sounds that makes Odia sound like Odia to anyone who knows the difference.
The Charyapadas --- the Buddhist mystical poems composed between the eighth and twelfth centuries, claimed by Bengali, Assamese, Maithili, and Odia scholars alike --- sit at the boundary of this linguistic divergence. Written in a late Apabhramsha or proto-vernacular that contains features of all four eastern languages, they are the common inheritance of the entire Eastern Magadhi branch. Several of their known authors, including Luipa and Kanhupa, are believed to have been from the Odra-Kalinga region. The Charyapadas are, in a sense, the last text of the undivided family --- the final literary expression before the siblings went their separate ways.
The Script’s Story: How a Leaf Shaped an Alphabet
If the Odia language is a sibling of Bengali, the Odia script is an unmistakable individual. Place a page of Odia text next to a page of Bengali, Hindi, or any other Indian language, and even someone who cannot read any of them will notice the difference. Odia script is round. Overwhelmingly, emphatically, beautifully round. Where Devanagari marches beneath a horizontal headline (shirorekha), and Bengali flows under its own distinctive matra line, Odia letters sit independently on the page, each one topped by a curved stroke that looks, from a distance, like a series of tiny umbrellas opening in a drizzle.
The reason for this roundness is one of those rare cases where the material explains the form so completely that the explanation feels almost too elegant. Odia script evolved on palm leaves. And palm leaves, when you drag a sharp iron stylus across them in a straight horizontal line, split along their fibres. The medium cannot tolerate straight lines. Curve the stroke, round the letter, let the stylus glide in an arc, and the leaf holds. The curvilinear form of the Odia script is not an aesthetic choice. It is a physical necessity dictated by the writing surface.
The evolutionary chain is well documented. The oldest writing in the Kalinga-Odra region uses Brahmi --- the angular, geometric script of the Ashokan edicts, which was also the ancestor of nearly every major script in South and Southeast Asia. From Brahmi, a regional variant emerged: the Kalinga script, attested in stone and copper-plate inscriptions from the early centuries CE. The Kalinga script was still largely angular --- stone and metal, unlike palm leaf, can tolerate straight lines. It was used for royal inscriptions, land grants, and official documents throughout the Eastern Ganga dynasty period.
The transformation happened between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, as the medium of writing shifted from stone to palm leaf. The inscriptional tradition continued --- kings still carved their achievements into rock and copper --- but the volume of writing on palm leaf exploded. Religious texts, literary works, astronomical tables, medical treatises, astrological charts, legal codes, poetry, erotica, mathematical calculations --- all of this was being written on dried leaves of the palmyra and talipot palm, using an iron stylus called a lekhani. And as the palm leaf became the dominant medium, the script adapted. The angular strokes of the Kalinga inscriptional tradition softened into curves. The characteristic “umbrella” or “hook” shape at the top of each letter --- which distinguishes Odia from every other Indian script --- emerged as scribes found the most natural way to begin each character with a curved stroke that would not split the leaf.
By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the full-fledged Odia script had acquired its classical form. The transition was complete. Where Devanagari connected its letters beneath a continuous horizontal line and Bengali connected them beneath a broken one, Odia letters stood individually, each crowned with its own rounded canopy, each a self-contained unit of graceful curves.
The comparison with other scripts is illuminating. Devanagari’s shirorekha --- the horizontal line that connects letters --- is a structural feature that makes the script visually linear, like words hanging from a clothesline. Bengali’s matra line performs a similar function, though the line is broken at intervals, giving the script a slightly more modular appearance. Odia has no such connecting line. Each letter is an island. This gives Odia text a distinctive visual texture: round, open, spacious, as if the alphabet is breathing. The aesthetics are not incidental. They emerge from the physics of stylus meeting leaf. And they make Odia one of the most visually distinctive scripts in the world --- recognizable at a glance, even at a distance, even by someone who has never read a word of it.
The printing press changed the script without breaking it. The first Odia book to be printed was a translation of a portion of the New Testament, produced by the Serampore Mission Press in Bengal in 1807. Three decades later, in 1837, the Cuttack Mission Press was established by Christian missionaries Charles Lacey and Amos Sutton --- the first printing press in Odisha itself. Its first publication was reportedly a satire on the Jagannath Festival, which tells you something about the tensions between missionary enterprise and the culture they were operating within. But the press did something far more consequential than distributing religious tracts. It created the first standardized Odia typeface.
The shift from stylus to movable type imposed a new kind of standardization on the script. The infinite subtle variations of a hand-carved letter --- the slight differences in pressure, angle, and curve that made each scribe’s writing distinctive --- were replaced by the uniform strokes of cast metal type. The script did not lose its roundness. But it gained a regularity it had never possessed in the manuscript tradition. And with the printing press came the possibility of mass literacy, mass circulation, and the emergence of Odia journalism and modern literature. The first Odia newspaper, Kujibara Patrika, was launched from the Cuttack Mission Press in the same year it was established --- 1837. Gaurishankar Ray and his associates used the press to develop a stream of Odia textbooks. The technology that came from Europe became the infrastructure for Odia linguistic survival.
This is the irony of the colonial encounter: the same British administration that threatened to erase Odia by replacing it with Bengali also provided the printing technology that made Odia’s modern literary flourishing possible. The tools of the colonizer were repurposed by the colonized. The medium changed from leaf to paper to metal type. The script curved on.
The Prestige Dialect: How Cuttack Became “Standard”
Before we map the dialects, it is necessary to address the elephant in the room: the concept of “standard” Odia, and the power dynamics embedded within it.
Standard Odia --- the language of textbooks, news broadcasts, government documents, and literary fiction --- is based on the dialect of the Cuttack-Puri-Bhubaneswar region. This is the variety sometimes called Kataki Odia (from Kataka, the old name for Cuttack), or Central Coastal Odia. It is what a newsreader on Doordarshan speaks. It is what Gopinath Mohanty wrote his novels in. It is the version of Odia that the printing press standardized, that the education system teaches, and that the state government uses.
There is nothing linguistically inevitable about this. The Cuttack dialect became the standard for the same reason that Parisian French became standard French, or that London English became Received Pronunciation: because the political, economic, and cultural capital was located there. Cuttack was the administrative capital of Odisha for centuries --- under the Mughals, under the Marathas, under the British. It was where the courts sat, where the schools were established, where the printing presses operated. When Fakir Mohan Senapati fought to save Odia from Bengali absorption in the nineteenth century, the Odia he was saving was, naturally, the Odia of Cuttack --- the variety most accessible to the administrative and literary elite.
The result is a hierarchy that every Odia speaker intuitively understands, even if they rarely articulate it. Standard (Kataki) Odia occupies the top. It is the language of education, media, and prestige. Below it, the regional dialects are arranged in an unofficial ranking based on proximity to the standard and the perceived “sophistication” of their speakers. This is the same phenomenon that exists in every language where one dialect has been elevated to official status: the standard becomes “correct,” and everything else becomes “colorful” or “rustic” or, in the less charitable formulation, “uneducated.”
This hierarchy matters because it shapes who feels ownership over the language and who feels like a guest in it. A Sambalpuri speaker in Sambalpur knows that when they go to Bhubaneswar, their speech will mark them as provincial. A Ganjami speaker in Berhampur knows that their Telugu-inflected vowels will sound “different” in Cuttack. A Desia speaker from Koraput knows that the Odia they learned as a second language --- adapted from their tribal mother tongue --- will never sound like what comes out of a television. The standard dialect is a tool of communication and a tool of hierarchy at the same time. To understand Odia’s many voices, you have to understand that one voice has been designated the “real” one, and the rest have been asked, with varying degrees of politeness, to conform.
Sambalpuri/Kosali: The Western Voice and Its Rebellion
Drive west from Bhubaneswar, past the Mahanadi dam at Hirakud, into the red-soil districts of Sambalpur, Bargarh, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Bolangir, Sonepur, Deogarh, and Nuapada, and you enter a linguistic world that is, depending on whom you ask, either a dialect of Odia or a separate language altogether. The people here call their tongue Kosli (also spelled Kosali, Koshal, or Koshali). The state government calls it Sambalpuri. Linguists call the question unresolved. And the politics of that unresolved question tell you more about the relationship between language and power in Odisha than any textbook definition could.
The differences between Sambalpuri and standard Odia are not trivial. A 2006 sociolinguistic survey found that Sambalpuri varieties share approximately seventy-five percent of their basic vocabulary with standard Odia. That sounds like a lot --- until you consider that mutual intelligibility studies typically consider anything below about eighty-five percent to be the threshold where two varieties start functioning as separate languages rather than dialects of the same one. Seventy-five percent means a quarter of the basic word stock is different. In practice, a monolingual Sambalpuri speaker and a monolingual Cuttacki speaker would struggle with each other’s speech.
The phonological differences are systematic. Sambalpuri has lost the voiced retroflex lateral approximant (/ɭ/) that standard Odia preserves --- the very sound that distinguishes Odia from Bengali and Assamese. It shows vowel harmony patterns where /o/ shifts to /u/. It drops word-final schwas through a process linguists call apocope --- where standard Odia would pronounce a final vowel, Sambalpuri clips it off. Consonant clusters behave differently. The intonation contour is distinct --- a Sambalpuri sentence rises and falls in patterns that a Cuttacki ear recognizes immediately as “western.”
The grammar diverges too. Sambalpuri uses three negative markers --- nain, na, and ni --- where standard Odia uses a different set. Verb conjugations follow their own patterns. Sentence-final particles differ. To a linguist, the cumulative weight of these phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences places Sambalpuri at the outer boundary of what can comfortably be called a “dialect.” Whether it crosses that boundary into “language” is a question that linguistics alone cannot answer, because the line between a dialect and a language is always partly political.
And the politics here are sharp. The Kosli language movement, driven by writers, historians, politicians, and linguists from the western districts, has been pushing for official recognition of Kosli as a distinct language and its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution --- the list of officially recognized languages of India. The literary argument is largely won: western Odisha has its own literary tradition stretching back centuries. The Kosalananda Kavya, composed in the seventeenth century under Raja Baliar Singh of the Sambalpur State, is an early example. Gangadhar Meher (1862-1924), one of the most important poets in the broader Odia literary tradition, wrote in a language deeply inflected by the western dialect. And Haldhar Nag (born 1950), a self-taught poet from the village of Ghens in Bargarh district, composes exclusively in Sambalpuri-Kosali. When Nag received the Padma Shri in 2016, it was a milestone not just for a man but for a dialect --- official national recognition that the “other” Odia could produce literature worthy of the republic’s highest civilian honours.
But the political argument remains unresolved. Inclusion in the Eighth Schedule would mean state resources for Kosli-language education, media, and cultural institutions. It would also mean, symbolically, that the Indian state recognizes Kosli as something other than a variety of Odia. This is where the opposition comes from. For Odia linguistic nationalists, the Kosli movement threatens to fracture the hard-won unity of the Odia-speaking identity --- the same identity that Fakir Mohan Senapati fought to establish and that the 1936 formation of the province was built upon. If Kosli is a separate language, the argument goes, then the demographic basis for Odisha as a linguistic state weakens. The fear is not entirely irrational. India has created new states on linguistic lines before. Whether the Kosli demand would ever lead to a political demand for a separate Koshal state is debatable --- the movement’s political energy has waxed and waned --- but the anxiety about fragmentation is real.
The deeper issue is one of cultural recognition. Western Odisha has long felt neglected by the coastal-dominated state government. The demand for Kosli recognition is, at one level, a linguistic claim. At another, it is a proxy for a much larger grievance about political representation, economic development, and cultural respect. When a Sambalpuri speaker says “our language is not just a dialect,” they are also saying “our region is not just a hinterland.”
The Sambalpuri music tradition makes the point in a different register. The folk songs of western Odisha --- Rasarkeli, Dalkhai, Maelajada, Sajani, Nachnia --- are composed and performed in Kosli, accompanied by the dhol, nisan, tamki, and mahuri. These songs are inseparable from the dialect. The love-playfulness of a Rasarkeli lyric, the harvest-joy of a Dalkhai performed at Nuakhai, the teasing dialogues between male and female singers --- they work because of the specific sounds, rhythms, and vocabulary of Sambalpuri. Translate them into standard Odia, and you do not get a translation. You get a different song. The art form and the dialect are co-constitutive. Each makes the other what it is.
Baleswari: The Northern Border
Move to the opposite end of the state --- the northern coastal districts of Balasore, Bhadrak, and parts of Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar --- and you encounter Baleswari Odia, a dialect shaped by its proximity to Bengal.
Baleswari sits at a linguistic frontier. Balasore district borders West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur, and the dialect spoken here shows perceptible Bengali influence in its vocabulary, intonation, and certain grammatical features. Where standard Odia says kana (what), Baleswari says kisa. Where standard Odia asks kahiki (why), Baleswari asks kene. These are not random substitutions. They reflect a border zone where two language communities have been in contact for centuries, where marriages cross linguistic lines, where market interactions happen in a mixed idiom, and where children grow up hearing both tongues.
The accent is noticeably different from standard Odia --- faster, with a slightly different intonation pattern that occasionally reminds a listener of the Medinipur Bengali spoken just across the border. Baleswari speakers are often teased in Bhubaneswar for “sounding Bengali,” which is both unfair and revealing. Unfair because the dialect has its own internal logic and history. Revealing because it shows how linguistic proximity to Bengali remains, in the Odia imagination, a sensitive point --- a residue, perhaps, of the nineteenth-century struggle when Bengali threatened to swallow Odia entirely.
Within the Baleswari zone, there are gradations. The dialect spoken in Bhadrak district is closer to standard Odia than the dialect spoken in Balasore proper. The variety spoken in Mayurbhanj (sometimes called Mayurbhanjia) has its own sub-features, shaped by the presence of large Santal and Ho tribal populations in the district. Keonjhar’s variant (Kendujharia) carries additional tribal-language influence. Each sub-district variety is a palimpsest of contact and history.
Ganjami: The Southern Inflection
At the southern end of Odisha, in Ganjam, Gajapati, and parts of Kandhamal, the Odia language takes on a distinctly different sound. Ganjami Odia --- sometimes called Brahmapuria, after the city of Berhampur (Brahmapur), the region’s urban centre --- is the variety most influenced by Telugu, the Dravidian language spoken immediately to the south in Andhra Pradesh.
The Telugu influence is not subtle. Berhampur’s Odia is spoken with an intonation pattern and vowel quality that can sound remarkably like Telugu to someone unfamiliar with either language. Certain Telugu words have been absorbed into daily speech. The pronunciation of retroflex consonants shifts. The overall melodic contour of sentences follows patterns that feel southern rather than eastern.
This makes linguistic sense. Ganjam district was historically a contested border zone between Odia-speaking and Telugu-speaking territories. Parts of what is now Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh were once part of the Ganjam administrative region, and Ganjami Odia is still spoken in parts of Srikakulam. The 1936 formation of Odisha as a linguistic province drew a political line through what was, linguistically, a gradient --- a zone where Odia shaded into Telugu without a clean break. The people on either side of that line did not stop talking to each other. The dialect preserves the evidence of that ongoing conversation.
Ganjami Odia also has a distinct literary and folk tradition. The region’s folk songs carry a melodic quality that reflects the Telugu musical influence. The dialect is the medium of a rich oral tradition that combines southern Indian musical sensibilities with Odia narrative forms. It is a variety that reminds you that the boundaries drawn on political maps are always more porous than the maps suggest.
Phulbani, Boudh-Kandhamal, and the Hill Variants
The central highlands of Odisha --- Kandhamal, Boudh, and the surrounding hill country --- produce their own Odia variants. Phulbani Odia (named after the old district headquarters of Kandhamal) is a dialect shaped by the geography of isolation. The hill districts were, until relatively recently, difficult to access. Roads were few, communication sparse, and the dominant populations were tribal communities --- particularly the Kondh --- whose languages belong to an entirely different family (Dravidian). The Odia spoken here by the non-tribal population has been influenced by this environment: it carries Kondh loanwords, shifts in pronunciation that reflect long contact with Kui-speaking communities, and a pace and rhythm shaped by a landscape where distances are measured in hours of walking rather than kilometres of driving.
Boudh-Kandhamal Odia is often grouped with Phulbani Odia but has its own sub-features. The variety in Boudh leans slightly more toward the Sambalpuri influence of the adjacent western districts, while the Kandhamal variety shows stronger Dravidian substrate effects. These are small differences, detectable only by speakers from the region or by trained linguists. But they matter to the people who speak them. Your dialect is your address. It tells anyone listening not just which state you come from, but which district, which block, which side of which hill.
Desia: The Odia That Tribal Communities Made Their Own
In the southwestern districts of Koraput, Nabarangpur, Rayagada, and Malkangiri --- the heartland of tribal Odisha --- there is a variety of Odia called Desia (sometimes Desiya or Koraputi). It is, in many ways, the most linguistically fascinating of all Odia’s regional forms, because it is not simply a regional dialect. It is a contact language --- an Odia that has been shaped, phonologically and lexically, by the dozens of tribal languages spoken around it.
Desia serves as the lingua franca among the different ethnic groups of the former undivided Koraput district. In a region where a Paraja speaker, a Gadaba speaker, a Kondh speaker, and a non-tribal Odia speaker might live in adjacent villages, Desia is the common medium. It is the language of the weekly market, the district court, the bus stop, and increasingly, the school.
But Desia is not standard Odia spoken with an accent. It is structurally different. It has nineteen consonant phonemes and six vowels --- no long vowels, like standard Odia, but the consonant inventory is reduced. The voiced retroflex lateral approximant (/ɭ/) --- that hallmark Odia sound --- is absent. Many words that exist in standard Odia do not exist in Desia, replaced by terms borrowed from the surrounding tribal languages. Pronunciation drops or changes certain sounds in ways that are systematic, not random. Lexical similarity between Desia and standard Odia runs to about eighty to eighty-five percent --- higher than Sambalpuri, but still low enough to cause comprehension difficulties for a speaker of standard Odia encountering Desia for the first time.
What Desia represents is adaptation. When tribal communities adopted Odia --- whether through market necessity, administrative compulsion, or simple proximity --- they did not adopt it wholesale. They reshaped it. They fitted it to the phonological habits of their own tongues. They borrowed its vocabulary selectively, kept their own where the Odia equivalent did not capture what they needed to say, and created something that is neither standard Odia nor a tribal language but a third thing: a creole zone where the Indo-Aryan world and the Munda-Dravidian world meet and produce something new. Desia is not a degraded Odia. It is a creative synthesis. Its existence is evidence that languages are not fixed structures imposed from above but living systems shaped from below by the people who actually use them.
The Other Tongues: Tribal Languages of Odisha
Beneath, beside, and around the Odia dialects, Odisha holds one of the densest concentrations of linguistic diversity in India. Twenty-one tribal languages and seventy-four dialects, spanning at least three major language families, are spoken within the borders of a single state. The tribal populations who speak them number in the millions. And the languages they speak are, in many cases, under existential threat.
The Munda Family
The Munda languages belong to the Austroasiatic family --- the same family that includes Vietnamese and Khmer, languages spoken thousands of kilometres to the east. The presence of Austroasiatic languages in eastern India is itself a monument to an ancient migration. According to the linguist Paul Sidwell, Munda-speaking populations arrived on the coast of Odisha from Southeast Asia approximately four thousand years ago, making them among the oldest continuous language communities in the subcontinent.
Santali is the giant of the Munda group. With approximately 7.6 million speakers across India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, it is the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language in the world, after Vietnamese and Khmer. In Odisha, Santali speakers are concentrated in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, and Balasore districts. Santali achieved a milestone in 2003 when it was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution through the 92nd Amendment --- the first (and so far only) Munda language to receive this recognition. It is written in Ol Chiki, an indigenous alphabetic script invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, a Santal intellectual from what is now Mayurbhanj district. Ol Chiki is remarkable: unlike most Indic scripts, which are abugidas (where consonants carry an inherent vowel), Ol Chiki is a true alphabet, giving vowels equal graphic representation with consonants. Its letter shapes are deliberately drawn from natural forms --- a crescent, a flame, a river bend. The centenary of Ol Chiki was celebrated in Odisha in 2025, with Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi --- himself a Santal --- presiding over ceremonies in Keonjhar. The symbolism was layered: a Santal Chief Minister celebrating a Santal script in a state where Santali speakers had, for most of its history, been governed in a language not their own.
Ho is closely related to Mundari and is spoken by approximately 2.2 million people across Jharkhand and Odisha, with significant populations in Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar districts. It uses the Warang Chiti script, invented by Lako Bodra, though Devanagari and Odia scripts are also used. All India Radio has been broadcasting Ho-language programmes from Keonjhar, Rourkela, Cuttack, and Baripada.
Mundari has about 1.6 million speakers across Jharkhand, Odisha, and West Bengal, with over 120,000 in Odisha, concentrated in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Balasore, and Sundargarh. It uses its own script, Mundari Bani, invented by Rohidas Singh Nag, though Devanagari and Odia scripts are also commonly used.
Kharia has about 300,000 speakers, with populations in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha. The language has an interesting internal split: the Dudh Kharia and Dhelki Kharia speak the Munda language Kharia, but the Hill Kharia have shifted to an Indo-Aryan language called Kharia Thar --- a living example of language shift in progress, where a community abandons its ancestral tongue for the language of its neighbours.
Juang is endemic to Odisha --- found nowhere else on earth. Spoken in the hill tracts of Keonjhar, northern Angul, and eastern Dhenkanal, it has approximately 20,000 to 30,000 speakers, and that number is falling. It is classified as endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Juang is the most closely related to Kharia within the Munda family, and it has distinctive linguistic features: it differentiates three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), and stress always falls on the second syllable. But the language is eroding. Younger Juangs increasingly use Odia and Hindi as their primary languages, borrowing heavily from both. The head-marking features that distinguish Juang grammar are weakening. When a grammatical feature starts disappearing from the speech of younger speakers, it means the structural core of the language is coming apart.
Bonda (also called Remo or Remosam) is spoken by the isolated Bonda people of Malkangiri’s hill country. With estimates ranging from 9,000 to 12,000 speakers, it is classified as vulnerable by UNESCO. Bonda is a spoken language with no traditional written system. As more Bonda people adopt Odia as their primary language of communication, Remo is losing ground --- not to a military force or an administrative edict, but to the simple gravitational pull of the larger language. The market speaks Odia. The school speaks Odia. The radio speaks Odia. Every generation that grows up with more Odia and less Remo brings the language closer to the edge.
Gadaba --- or more precisely, Gutob --- is a Southern Munda language spoken by the Gadaba community in Koraput. The Gadaba situation is linguistically unusual: the same ethnic group is split between two language families. The Gutob-Gadaba speak a Munda language. The Dravidian Gadaba speak Ollari and Kondekor, which are Dravidian. The same tribal name, two entirely different linguistic heritages. Gutob has perhaps 5,000 to 15,000 speakers, depending on which estimate you trust, and it has absorbed significant Dravidian vocabulary from the surrounding Kui-Kuvi-speaking populations.
The Dravidian Family
If the Munda languages represent the Austroasiatic layer of Odisha’s linguistic stratigraphy, the Dravidian languages represent the other ancient substrate --- a family that dominated the southern half of the subcontinent and still extends deep into the tribal heartland of eastern India.
Kui is the largest Dravidian language in Odisha, spoken by approximately 940,000 people, almost entirely within the state. It is the language of the Kandha (Kondh) tribe, concentrated in Kandhamal district (where Kondhs make up fifty-five percent of the population), as well as parts of Ganjam, Rayagada, Boudh, and Koraput. Kui is closely related to Gondi and Kuvi. It has its own script, Kuilipi, though it is more commonly written in Odia script. The Odisha government has been pushing for Kui to be included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution --- a recognition that would bring institutional support for Kui-language education and cultural production.
Kuvi is Kui’s close cousin, spoken by about 155,000 people in Rayagada, Koraput, and Kandhamal. Kui and Kuvi are close enough that some linguists consider them dialects of a single language, yet they are not always mutually intelligible --- a reminder that the dialect-language boundary is fuzzy even within a single tribal community. The Kondh people are the same ethnic group speaking both languages; the split between Kui and Kuvi is geographical and historical rather than ethnic.
Gondi is one of the most widely spoken tribal languages in India, but only a fraction of the Gond population actually speaks it. Although nearly 13 million people identified as Gonds in the 2011 Census, only about 3 million recorded Gondi as their language. In Odisha, Gondi speakers are found primarily in Nabarangpur district. The language has been introduced into primary schools in tribal-dominated districts as part of preservation efforts, but the overall trajectory is one of decline: Gondi is losing speakers to Hindi, Odia, and other state languages faster than educational programmes can produce new ones.
Sora (also Saora or Savara) is classified as Austroasiatic, not Dravidian --- it belongs to the Munda family --- but it is spoken in the same southern Odisha region as the Dravidian languages, and its story is worth telling here. With nearly 300,000 speakers in Odisha (concentrated in Ganjam, Gajapati, and Rayagada) and additional populations in Andhra Pradesh, Sora is one of the larger tribal languages. It has its own script, Sorang Sompeng, invented in 1936 by Malia Gomango --- a visionary script whose letter shapes are designed to evoke natural forms. UNESCO lists Sora as vulnerable to extinction. The language is the medium of a rich oral tradition --- songs, stories, ritual chants --- that encodes the Saora people’s relationship with their landscape and their ancestors. When Sora dies, it will not only be a language that disappears. It will be an entire way of understanding the hill country of southern Odisha.
Parji (Duruwa) is a Central Dravidian language spoken in Koraput and parts of Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district. It is primarily a spoken language, written in Odia script in Koraput and Devanagari in Bastar when it is written at all. Its speakers, the Paraja, are one of the largest tribal communities in southern Odisha --- the same community whose destruction through debt bondage Gopinath Mohanty anatomized in his novel Paraja.
What Is Lost When a Language Dies
The bare statistics --- twenty-one languages, seventy-four dialects, multiple language families, millions of speakers --- do not convey what is actually at stake. A tribal language is not simply a communication system. It is a knowledge archive. It encodes centuries of accumulated information about the local ecology --- which plants are medicinal, which soils are fertile, which weather patterns signal drought or flood. It carries the community’s legal norms, its social protocols, its understanding of kinship and obligation, its cosmology, its sense of humour, its way of naming the world. Every word is a compressed unit of cultural experience. When the last Juang speaker who knows the old words for specific forest plants dies without passing them on, that botanical knowledge --- knowledge that no outsider has documented, because no outsider knew enough to ask the right questions --- dies with them.
The Odisha government’s Multi-Lingual Education (MLE) programme, launched in 2006, represents one of the most ambitious efforts in India to address this. Under MLE, tribal children in Odisha receive initial instruction in their mother tongue before transitioning to Odia and eventually Hindi and English. The state has appointed over 3,300 tribal language teachers across twenty-one languages. The programme recognizes a basic pedagogical truth: children learn better in the language they think in. But it also, implicitly, recognizes that the tribal languages have a right to exist --- that they are not obstacles to be overcome on the way to “real” education but mediums of thought and knowledge in their own right.
Whether MLE is enough is another question. The programme operates within a system where the economic incentives still overwhelmingly favour Odia, Hindi, and English. A child who learns to read in Juang or Bonda will eventually have to function in a world that runs on other languages. The question is whether the transition can be managed in a way that adds languages without subtracting the first one --- whether bilingualism (or trilingualism, or quadrilingualism, as many tribal children already practise) can be sustained across generations, or whether the gravitational pull of the larger language will eventually collapse the smaller one into a few words, a few songs, a few old people talking to each other while their grandchildren reply in Odia.
Language and Power: The Politics of the Tongue
The political history of the Odia language is, in a compressed form, the political history of Odisha itself. Every major turning point in the state’s formation has been, at its root, a fight about language.
The foundational fight was the nineteenth-century struggle against Bengali. In the 1860s and 1870s, the British colonial administration, which governed Odisha as a subdivision of the Bengal Presidency (and later as part of the Bihar and Orissa Province), began systematically replacing Odia with Bengali in schools, courts, and administrative offices. The logic was bureaucratic: Bengali was already established as the language of administration in Bengal, and since Odisha was administered from Calcutta, why not standardize? Bengali intellectuals, some genuinely convinced and some motivated by cultural chauvinism, supplied the academic cover. They argued that Odia was not a separate language at all but merely a rustic dialect of Bengali --- a claim that infuriated Odia speakers and that modern linguistics has decisively rejected, but that carried real weight in colonial policy circles at the time.
The man who stood at the centre of the resistance was Fakir Mohan Senapati. Born in 1843 in Balasore --- the northernmost Odia-speaking district, the one closest to Bengal and therefore the first to feel the pressure --- Senapati fought on two fronts. Politically, he organized, wrote pamphlets, gave speeches, and mobilized Odia intellectuals to demand recognition of Odia as an independent language. Literarily, he wrote. He wrote poetry, short stories, translations, textbooks, and ultimately Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third, 1897-1902), one of the earliest realist novels in any Indian language. The literary achievement was itself a political argument: here is what Odia can do. Here is a novel as structurally sophisticated as anything in Bengali. Now tell me again that Odia is just a dialect.
Senapati was not alone. Radhanath Ray (1848-1908) and Madhusudan Rao (1853-1912) fought the same fight in different registers. Radhanath Ray released Odia poetry from conventional forms and rhythms, demonstrating that the language could handle the innovations of modern verse. Madhusudan Rao, the father of modern Odia lyric, replaced traditional forms like chautisa and koili with odes, elegies, and sonnets borrowed from Western literary traditions but composed in Odia. Together with Senapati, they formed a generation whose literary production was inseparable from their political activism --- they wrote to prove that their language deserved to survive.
The fight succeeded. The Odia language was recognized as distinct. And from that recognition flowed the political movement for a separate Odia-speaking province. The Utkal Sammilani (Utkal Union Conference), established in 1903, unified the demand: bring all Odia-speaking people, scattered across the Bengal Presidency, the Bihar-Orissa Province, the Central Provinces, and the Madras Presidency, into a single administrative unit defined by linguistic identity.
On April 1, 1936, it happened. Odisha became a separate province --- the first in British India to be formed on a linguistic basis. The date is celebrated every year as Utkala Dibasa (Odisha Day). The celebration is, at its core, a celebration of language. Odisha exists because Odia exists. The state was literally created to give the language a political home.
The post-independence era introduced new complexities. The three-language formula, adopted nationally in 1968, mandated that students in non-Hindi-speaking states learn three languages: the regional language, Hindi, and English. In Odisha, this meant Odia, Hindi, and English. The formula was a compromise, but its practical effect was to ensure that Hindi and English occupied institutional space alongside Odia, particularly in higher education and central government employment, where Odia carried no weight at all.
What is remarkable about Odisha’s relationship with Hindi is the absence of resistance. Tamil Nadu fought Hindi imposition with street protests, political upheaval, and eventually forced the central government to extend English as an alternative indefinitely. Odisha did nothing comparable. Hindi spread through schools, cinema, television, and migration without provoking the linguistic backlash that the southern states mounted. Why? Part of the answer is geographic --- Odisha is geographically and culturally positioned between the Hindi-speaking north and the Dravidian south, and the cultural currents from the north have always flowed more easily than those from the south. Part of the answer is economic --- Hindi provides access to a national job market that Odia alone cannot. And part of the answer is historical: Odisha’s defining linguistic trauma was Bengali, not Hindi. The cultural immune system was primed to resist Bengali absorption, not Hindi expansion. By the time Hindi became pervasive, it was already too familiar to feel foreign.
The modern tension is not Odia versus Hindi. It is Odia versus English. Across the state, English-medium private schools are proliferating, driven by parental demand for the economic advantages that English-language education is perceived to confer. Meanwhile, Odia-medium government schools face declining enrollment --- though that trend partially reversed after 2020-21, when government school enrollment rose by nineteen to twenty percent, likely influenced by the economic pressures of the pandemic. But the structural dynamic remains: the parents who choose English-medium education are making rational decisions within a system that rewards English proficiency disproportionately. The MLAs who give speeches in Odia about the importance of Odia send their own children to English-medium schools. The hypocrisy is systemic, not individual. No amount of cultural rhetoric can overcome a labour market that pays a premium for English.
The Sound of Odia: What Makes It What It Is
Every language has a sonic signature --- a set of phonological features that makes it recognizable even before a listener can identify individual words. For Odia, this signature is distinctive enough that linguists have named specific features, and ordinary speakers have developed intuitive descriptions that, while not technically precise, capture something real.
The most commonly noted feature is the retention of the inherent vowel. In Hindi, the word for “name” is written nama but pronounced naam --- the final a is dropped (a process called schwa deletion). In Bengali, the same process is even more aggressive. In Odia, the final vowel is retained. Phula (flower) is phula, not phul. Ghara (house) is ghara, not ghar. This gives Odia a fullness of syllable, a weightedness, that Hindi and Bengali lack. To an outsider’s ear, Odia can sound like a more deliberate language --- each word completing itself rather than clipping off at the end.
The retroflex lateral (/ɭ/) adds another distinctive flavour. This sound does not exist in Hindi, Bengali, or Assamese. It is produced by curling the tongue back to the palate and letting the air flow around the sides, and it gives certain Odia words a quality that is hard to describe but immediately recognizable. The Odia letter ଳ (La with a dot below, sometimes called muurdhanya La) represents this sound, and it appears frequently enough in common vocabulary to be a persistent thread in the sonic texture of the language.
The sibilant merger --- the collapse of Sanskrit’s three sibilants into a single /s/ sound --- aligns Odia with its Bengali and Assamese siblings and distinguishes it from Hindi (which retains all three) and Telugu (which has its own sibilant system). This means Odia lacks the sh sound that Hindi uses constantly. The word that Hindi pronounces as Shiva is Siba in Odia. This small phonological difference creates a large perceptual effect: to a Hindi speaker’s ear, Odia can sound as though it is mispronouncing every sh --- an impression that says more about the Hindi speaker’s assumptions than about Odia’s phonology.
The overall musicality of Odia is frequently commented on by outsiders and fiercely defended by native speakers. The language does have a particular rhythmic quality --- a consequence of the retained vowels, the retroflex consonants, the specific distribution of aspirated and unaspirated stops, and the intonation patterns of the standard dialect. Whether this makes Odia objectively “musical” or “sweet” (descriptions that Odia speakers love to hear and that linguists are professionally sceptical of) is unanswerable. Every language sounds beautiful to its native speakers. But Odia’s specific phonological profile --- softer consonants than Hindi, rounder vowels than Bengali, more deliberate pacing than either --- does give it a recognizable sonic character. It is not the staccato percussion of Hindi or the nasal sweep of Bengali. It is something gentler, slower, more rounded. Like the script, the sound bends.
Digital Odia: The Language in the Age of Screens
On February 20, 2014, the Government of India declared Odia a Classical Language. On the very same day, in living rooms and tea stalls across Odisha, people were typing Odia in Roman script on their smartphones --- kemiti achha instead of କେମିତି ଅଛ --- because their phones did not have a functional Odia keyboard.
The gap between official recognition and technological reality tells the story of Odia’s digital transition. For years, typing in Odia script was an ordeal. Pre-Unicode fonts were incompatible across platforms. A document created in one Odia font on one computer would display as gibberish on another. Web pages in Odia were rare because the technical infrastructure for rendering the script reliably did not exist. Odia Wikipedia, launched in 2002, struggled for nearly a decade before gaining momentum after 2011, when Unicode compliance improved and a workable typing solution was developed.
That solution was Lekhani --- an Odia typing scheme developed specifically for Odia Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects. The name is itself a statement of continuity: lekhani is the Odia word for the iron stylus used to write on palm leaves. The ancient writing tool lent its name to the digital one. Multiple input methods followed --- InScript (a standardized Indian-language keyboard layout), phonetic transliteration (where you type Romanized Odia and the software converts it to the Odia script), and mobile-friendly touchscreen keyboards.
The results have been significant. Odia Wikipedia now has over 3,100 articles on various topics. More importantly, everyday Odia speakers can now compose social media posts, emails, and WhatsApp messages in Odia script rather than Roman transliteration. Facebook groups in Odia have proliferated. YouTube channels in Odia produce content on everything from cooking to politics to literary criticism. Instagram accounts post Odia poetry and memes. A new generation of literary voices is publishing directly on digital platforms, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of Odia literary culture --- the sahitya sansad, the literary magazines, the university departments.
This digital renaissance is real, but it is also changing the language. The Odia of social media is not the Odia of Gopinath Mohanty or Pratibha Ray. It is a colloquial, code-switching, boundary-crossing Odia that borrows freely from Hindi and English, that invents new slang, that prioritizes speed and wit over grammatical precision. Purists are alarmed. They see the degradation of a classical language. Others see renewal: a language that young people actually want to use, in contexts where, a decade ago, they would have defaulted to English or Hindi. The question --- and it is genuinely open --- is whether the informal, hybrid Odia of digital platforms will eventually feed back into the formal literary language, enriching it, or whether it will create two parallel Odias that increasingly cannot communicate with each other.
The open-source movement has been critical. Open-source Odia fonts, input methods, language-processing tools, online dictionaries, and collaborative translation projects have democratized access to the digital Odia ecosystem. The Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore has supported multiple initiatives to strengthen Odia’s digital infrastructure, including Unicode font converters and typing solutions. These are technical achievements with cultural consequences: every tool that makes it easier to type, read, and publish in Odia script reduces the gravitational pull toward English as the default language of digital life.
But the challenges are structural. Most professional work in Odisha --- government, business, technology, higher education --- operates in English. Digital tools make it possible to write in Odia on a smartphone, but they do not change the fact that the job application, the college essay, and the government form are in English. The language’s digital presence is growing. Its institutional power is not. Whether the first can eventually reshape the second --- whether the sheer volume of Odia-language content creation can create new economic incentives for Odia literacy --- is the unanswered question of the next decade.
What a Language Contains
Think of a language the way a programmer thinks of a codebase. The surface layer --- the syntax, the vocabulary, the pronunciation --- is the API. It is what other people interact with. But beneath that surface is the architecture: the accumulated logic, the design decisions made centuries ago that constrain and enable everything built on top of them, the legacy code that nobody fully understands anymore but that the entire system depends on. When you lose a language, you do not just lose a set of words. You lose an architecture of thought.
Odia’s architecture is layered. At the deepest level, there are the Sanskrit roots that connect it to the entire Indo-Aryan family --- the shared inheritance of vocabulary, grammar, and conceptual categories that makes a Hindi speaker and an Odia speaker recognizably part of the same linguistic civilization. Above that, there is the Magadhi Prakrit layer --- the eastern branch that Odia shares with Bengali and Assamese, the sibling structure that makes these three languages sound related even when they are saying completely different things. Above that, there are the tribal substrate layers --- the Munda and Dravidian influences that have been absorbed into Odia over millennia of contact, the words and sounds that entered the language from communities that were here before the Indo-Aryan speakers arrived. And at the surface, there are the modern accretions --- the English loanwords, the Hindi borrowings, the Telugu and Bengali influences along the borders, the digital neologisms, the slang that each generation invents and the next generation discards.
Each layer carries knowledge. The Sanskrit layer carries philosophical and literary categories. The Prakrit layer carries the sounds and rhythms of everyday speech from two thousand years ago. The tribal layers carry ecological knowledge, place-names, and ways of describing the natural world that standard Odia never developed because it did not need to --- the tribal speakers already had the words. The border layers carry the evidence of centuries of cultural exchange. The digital layer carries the evidence that the language is still alive, still changing, still being used by people who choose it rather than being forced into it.
To speak Odia --- any variety of Odia, from the prestige Cuttacki of a television newsreader to the Desia of a Koraput market to the Sambalpuri of a Bargarh farmer --- is to carry all of these layers simultaneously. The speaker may not be conscious of them. They do not need to be. The layers are in the language, not in the speaker’s awareness. But they are there. And when any one of them is lost --- when a tribal language dies and its loanwords in Odia become orphaned words with no living source language, when a regional dialect is standardized out of existence, when the palm-leaf manuscript tradition is forgotten and the script’s connection to the leaf becomes mere trivia --- something irreplaceable goes with it.
Odisha has, at last count, one major Indo-Aryan language with at least six recognized dialects, twenty-one tribal languages spanning three language families, and seventy-four dialects. Within its borders, human beings think in Austroasiatic, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan structures simultaneously. This is not a linguistic problem to be solved by standardization. It is a civilizational asset of extraordinary value --- a living laboratory of how human minds can organize, express, and transmit experience in radically different ways. Every language lost from this ecosystem is a unique experiment in human cognition that can never be replicated.
The Odia script curved because the palm leaf demanded it. The language survived because its speakers demanded it. The question now is whether the dozens of tongues that share this land with Odia will be given the same chance to bend without breaking --- or whether the weight of the larger language, the state language, the market language, will finally flatten what centuries of contact and coexistence could not.
Next: Chapter 4 --- The Social Architecture --- explores how caste, village structure, marriage customs, gender, and the joint family have organized Odia life from ancient times to the present, and what happens when the architecture begins to crack.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.