Bangani
Western Pahari language of India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bangani (IPA: [bəŋɡaːɳiː], बंगाणी baṅgāṇī) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of Uttarkashi district in the west of the Garhwal division of Uttarakhand, India. It has been described as a member of the Western Pahari language group.[1] It shares at least half and possibly as much as two-thirds of its basic vocabulary with both neighbouring varieties of the Garhwali language and with two Western Pahari languages, Jaunsari and Sirmauri.[2]
.svg)
Lexical similarity with neighbors
Centum substrate hypothesis
Bangani is of interest amongst scholars of Indo-European languages, due to some unusual features.
Since the 1980s, Claus Peter Zoller – a scholar of Indian linguistics and literature – has hypothesised, controversially, that Bangani has a substrate from a centum-group Indo-European language. Zoller also suggests that Bangani has been misclassified as a dialect of Garhwali and is more closely related to the Western Pahari languages.
While Zoller's centum substrate hypothesis remains controversial, it and his underlying data have been supported by 21st century linguists and indologists, such as Anvita Abbi, Hans Henrich Hock,[4] and Koenraad Elst.[5] Abbi visited Bangan and confirmed the accuracy of Zoller's data.[6]
The substance of Zoller's claims has been rejected by George van Driem and Suhnu Sharma, in publications since 1996,[7] which claim that Zoller's data was flawed and that Bangani is an unambiguously satem language.
Zoller does not accept the findings by van Driem and Sharma, and claims that there are methodological issues and factual errors in van Driem and Sharma's work.[8][9] In addition, Zoller also notes the two scholars did not set foot in Bangan but interviewed speakers at another location near Bangan.[6]