Oriya

Oriya, also known as Odisha, a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken as a first language by 32.1 million people most of whom live in the Indian state of Odisha, although there are also significant Oriya-speaking populations in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh (Ethnologue).

Oriya is thought to have descended from a Prakrit spoken in Eastern India over 1,500 years ago. Of all the languages spoken in Northern India, Oriya shows the least influence of Persian and Arabic. However, it shows significant Buddhist and Jain influences.

 

Status

Oriya is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. It is a statutory provincial language in Odisha State, serving as the medium of everyday communication, as well as being used in education, government, business and in the media.

 

Dialects

(Ethnologue) identifies a number of regional varieties of Oriya:

• Halbi
• Midnapore Oriya
• Mughalbandi (Standard Oriya)
• North Balasore Oriya
• Northwestern Oriya
• Southern Oriya
• Western Oriya

 

Structure

 

Sound system

The sound system of Oriya shares many features with other Indo-Aryan languages.

 

Vowels

Oriya has 6 vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a	ɔ

• /i/ = ea in peat
• /e/ = e in pet
• /a/ = a in bar
• /u/ = oo in too
• /o/ = o in token
• /ɔ/ = o in bog

 

Consonants

Like all Indo–Aryan languages, Oriya has a rich system of consonants. Consonant clusters are permitted mostly in medial and final positions. Initial clusters are rare and mostly consist of a consonant + /r/.

		Bilabial	Alveo- dental	Retroflex	Post-alveolar/ palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	unaspirated voiceless	p	t	ʈ
	aspirated voiceless	pʰ	tʰ	ʈʰ		kʰ
	unaspirated voiced	b	d	ɖ
	aspirated voiced	bʰ	dʰ	ɖʰ		gʰ
Fricatives	voiceless		s		ʃ
Affricates	unaspirated voiceless				tʃ
	aspirated voiceless				tʃʰ
	unaspirated voiced				dʒ
	aspirated voiced				dʒʰ
Nasals		m	n	..ɳ
Laterals			l	.
Flap			r	ɽ
Approximant		ʋ

• There is a contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated stops and affricates, including voiced ones, e.g., p—pʰ, t—tʰ, k—kʰ, b—bʰ, d—dʰ, g—gʰ, etc. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
• There is a contrast between and apical vs. retroflex consonants, e.g., /t/ – /ʈ/, /d/ – /ɖ/, /n/ – /ɳ/, /r/ – /ɽ/. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth.
• /ʃ/ = sh in shop
• /tʃ/ = ch in chop
• /dʒ/ = j in job
• /ɳ/ has no equivalent in English
• /ʋ/ is pronounced as /w/ or as /v/.
• /j/ = y in yet

 

Stress

Stress in Oriya generally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word.

 

Grammar

The grammar of Oriya is very much like that of other Indo-Aryan languages. Like all these languages, Oriya is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes to roots to build words and to express grammatical relations.

 

Nouns

Oriya nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories:

• number: singular and plural
• gender: masculine, feminine
• case: nominative, genitive, accusative–dative, instrumental, ablative, locative, and vocative; all cases, except vocative, are marked by post-positions; the vocative case may be marked by a vocative particle or term of address;
• there are no definite or indefinite articles
• adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case

 

Verbs

Oriya verbs agree with their subjects (in the active voice), or with their objects (in the passive voice) in person, number and gender. Verbs are marked for the following categories:

• three persons: 1st, 2nd, 2nd honorific, 3rd
• two numbers: singular and plural
• three tenses: present, past, future
• two aspects: imperfective and perfective
• three moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional
• two voices: active and passive

 

Word order

The normal word order in Oriya is Subject – Object – Verb. Modifiers precede the nouns they modify. Indirect objects precede direct objects.

 

Vocabulary

Most of Oriya’s vocabulary derives from Sanskrit. The language also has loanwords from Persian, Arabic and from the Austronesian languages spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient Kalinga empire whose territory comprised most of the state of Odisha and parts of the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh.

Here are some common phrases and words in Oriya.

Hello	namaskar
Goodbye	bidaay namaskar
Thank you	dhanyabada
Please	dayakari
Yes	han
No	na

 

Below are Oriya numerals 1-10 in Romanization.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
ek	du’i	trini	chaari	paanjch	cha’a	saat	aath	na’a	dash

 

Below are the numerals 0-9 in Oriya script.

 

Writing

Oriya has a strong literary heritage dating back to the 13th century. Oriya script is an abugida written from left to right. Abugida is a type of writing system in which each character represents a consonant followed by a specific vowel. Other vowels are represented by a modification of the consonant symbol. Oriya script developed from the Brahmi script. It is thought that the rounded shapes of the Oriya characters resulted from twriting on palm fronds with a sharp stylus. Straight lines and sharp angles would have torn the fronds.

Below is a sample of Oriya script representing the equivalent of the phrase Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 

Did You Know?

Do you know some English words that were borrowed from Oriya? Let us know and we’ll add them here!

 

Difficulty