Mewati language

Not to be confused with Mewari language.

Mewati
मेवाती میواتی
Native toIndia
RegionMewat region
Native speakers
860,000 (2011 census)[1]
Census results conflate most speakers with Hindi[2]
Devanagari, Perso-Arabic
Language codes
ISO 639-3wtm
Glottologmewa1250
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Rajasthani language and geographical distribution of its dialects

Mewati (Devanagri: मेवाती; Perso-Arabic: میواتی) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly by the Meo people. It has three million speakers in the Mewat Region (Alwar and Bharatpur, districts of Rajasthan, and the Nuh district of Haryana). According to the 2023 Pakistani census, there are around 1.1 million Mewati speakers in Pakistan.[3] While other people groups in the region also speak the Mewati language, it is one of the defining characteristics of the Meo culture.[4]

There are 9 vowels, 31 consonants, and two diphthongs. Suprasegmentals are less prominent than they are in the other dialects of Rajasthani. There are two numbers; singular and plural. Two genders; masculine and feminine, and three cases; direct, oblique, and vocative. The nouns decline according to their final segments. Case marking is postpositional. Pronouns are traditional in nature and are inflected for number and case. Gender is not distinguished in pronouns. There are two types of adjectives. There are three tenses; past, present, and future. Participles function as adjectives.

Phonology

There are twenty plosives at five places of articulation, each being tenuis, aspirated, voiced, and murmured: /p t ʈ tʃ k, pʰ tʰ ʈʰ tʃʰ kʰ, b d ɖ dʒ ɡ, bʱ dʱ ɖʱ dʒʱ ɡʱ/. Nasals and laterals may also be murmured, and there is a voiceless /h/ and a murmured /ɦ/.

See also

References

  1. ^ Mewati at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "Language" (PDF). Census of India. 2011.
  3. ^ "POPULATION BY MOTHER TONGUE, SEX AND RURAL/ URBAN" (PDF). www.pbs.gov.pk. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
  4. ^ Moonis Raza (1993). Social structure and regional development: a social geography perspective : essays in honour of Professor Moonis Raza. Rawat Publications Original from-the University of California. p. 166. ISBN 9788170331827.