Hinduri dialect

Hinduri
Handuri
हिंडूरी, hiṁḍūrī हंडूरी, haṁḍūrī
The word "Hinduri" written in Devanagari script
Native to	Himachal Pradesh
Region	Mahasu
Native speakers	(47,800 cited 2001 census)e25 Census results conflate some speakers with Hindi.
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Northern Western Pahari Hinduri
Writing system	Takri, Devanagari
Language codes
ISO 639-3	hii
Glottolog	hind1267

Hinduri (or Handuri) is a Western Pahari language of northern India. It is spoken in southern Solan district in southern parts of Ramshehar Tehsil and in eastern Nalagarh. It was classified as a dialect under the Mahasui Keonthali Group (as per Grierson).

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Dental/ Alveolar	Retroflex	Post-alv./ Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	voiced	m	n	ɳ		ŋ
	breathy	mʱ	nʱ
Stop/ Affricate	voiceless	p	t	ʈ	tɕ	k
	aspirated	pʰ	tʰ	ʈʰ	tɕʰ	kʰ
	voiced	b	d	ɖ	dʑ	ɡ
	breathy	bʱ	dʱ	ɖʱ	dʑʱ	ɡʱ
Fricative			s		ɕ		h
Rhotic	voiced		r	ɽ
	breathy			ɽʱ
Lateral	voiced		l	ɭ
	breathy		lʱ
Approximant		w			j

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	iː		uː
	ɪ		ʊ
Mid	eː	ə	oː
	ɛ		ɔ
Low	(æ)	ɑ ɑː

Script

Sample text in Handuri From Grierson's book (1916)

Status

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. The language has no official status. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is of critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Handuri are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially.

The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari (Himachali)' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations are striving to save the language. The language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it.

See also

• Mahasu Pahari
• Keonthali dialect
• Baghati dialect
• Baghliani dialect