Sora language

Speakers are concentrated mainly in Ganjam District, Gajapati District (including the central Gumma Hills region (Gumma Block),^[4] and Rayagada District, and are also found in adjacent areas such as Koraput and Phulbani districts; other communities exist in northern Andhra Pradesh (Vizianagaram District, Parvatipuram Manyam District and Srikakulam District).

The Sora language has faced a wavelike pattern of usage—that is, the number of people who speak Sora climbed steadily for decades before crashing down. In fact, the number of people who spoke Sora went from 157 thousand in 1901 to 166 thousand in 1911.^[5] In 1921, this number marginally rose to 168 thousand and kept climbing.^[5] In 1931, speaker numbers jumped to 194 thousand but in 1951, a period of exponential growth occurred, with speaker numbers jumping to 256 thousand.^[5] in 1961, numbers topped at 265 thousand speakers before crashing down in 1971 when speaker numbers dropped back down to 221 thousand.^[5]

Sora is spoken by the Sora people, who are a part of the Adivasi, or tribal people, in India, making Sora an Adivasi language.^[6] Sora is found in close proximity to Odia and Telugu speaking peoples so that many Sora people are bilingual.^[6] Sora had little literature except for a few songs and folk tales which are usually transmitted orally.^[6]

Ota & Patel (2021) identify several Sora dialects, including Lanjia-Sora, Imani, Kansid, Kampu, Tenkala, Sarda, and Juray-Sora. Zide (1982) characterizes Juray as a divergent variety of Sora,^[7] while later studies (e.g. Gomango & Anderson 2017) emphasize both sociolinguistic and structural differences between Juray and Sora. Recent study by Ota & Patel (2021) has brought focus on the geographic distribution and interrelations of Sora dialects, as well as the status of Juray as an separate language.^[8]

On a similar note, our understanding of Sora phonology is limited at best but there are some generalizations that can be made. Most syllables are of the Consonant, Vowel, Consonant form and morphemes usually contain one to three syllables.^[9] There are 18 identifiable consonants and they fall into most of the established origins of sound. Five consonants originate from the palate while only one consonant originates from the glottis. Although vowels may be pronounced differently, there exist only six vowels in Sora. There are no diacritics and aspiration varies depending on the speaker. It is likely that the influence of English, Odia, and Telugu has also affected vowel pronunciation over the course of Sora's use.^[10] Pronunciations also change in prevocalic (occurring before a vowel) and non prevocalic environments.

Sora consonants and vowels can undergo a process of sound alternation at prosodic level based on stress-shifts and morphosyntactic conditioned during which the consonants and vowels assimilate to match with the sound of preceding or following stem, or the final nasal with the initial obstruent of the following word. By doing this, some suffixes will merge with its verb phonotactically and a word can have several allomorphs depending on morphological properties of morpheme initials and codas produced during a casual or rapid speech.^[13]

In Sora, the basic clausal constituent order is SOV.

Compared to other Munda languages such as Kharia whose vocabulary is reported as having 40 percent of words borrowed from Indo-Aryan, Sora has very few, if not negligible, number of foreign loan words. Sora also has zero foreign phonemes.^[31] (Donegan & Stampe, 2004) Sora borrows words from surrounding languages like Telugu and Oriya.^[17] An example of a word borrowed from Oriya is kɘ'ra'ñja' which is a tree name.^[17] From Telugu mu'nu', which means black gram, is borrowed.^[17] Ramamurti (1931) identified three Sora words that apparently were borrowed from Prakrit during ancient time: siŋger (green ginger, cf. Pali singi vera and Sanskrit sr͎inga veram), kaːrella (bitter melon, cf. Sanskrit kāravella), and keda (fragrant screwpine, cf. Sanskrit keta-ki). Moreover, within the Munda family itself most words appear to be mutually intelligible owing to minor differences in pronunciations and phonology. Kharia and Korku, two other Munda languages, share mutually intelligible words with Sora.^[16] For example, the number 11 in Kharia is ghol moŋ, in Korku it is gel ḑo miya, and in Sora it is gelmuy.^[16] Each 11 in each language looks and sounds remarkably similar to the other 11's. This phenomenon is not just contained in numbers but rather a great deal of vocabulary is mutually intelligible among the Munda languages. Within the Austroasiatic language family more knowledge about Sora vocabulary can be found. The Mon-Khmer language family which encompasses the languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia has lexical cognates with the Munda family.^[10] That means that some words found in Sora are of direct proto-Austroasiatic origin and share similarities with other derived Austroasiatic language families.^[10] Words that relate to the body, family, home, field, as well as pronouns, demonstratives, and numerals are the ones with the most cognates.^[10]

The Sora language is written using multiple systems. The Sora Sompeng script was developed in 1936 by Mangei Gomango as a native writing system created for the Sora language.

Sora is also written in the Latin script, in the Odia alphabet in Odisha, and in the Telugu script in Andhra Pradesh.

Sora was one of the subjects of Ironbound Films' 2008 American documentary film The Linguists, in which two linguists attempted to document several moribund languages.^{[citation needed]}

• Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Sora". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
• Ramamurti, R. S. (1931). A Manual of the Sora (Savara) Language. Delhi: Mittal Publication.
• Veṅkaṭarāmamūrti, G. (1986). Sora–English dictionary. Delhi: Mittal Publication.
• Anderson, Gregory D.S (ed). 2008. The Munda languages. Routledge Language Family Series 3.New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-32890-X.