Rajasthani Language and dialects:

India is a very interesting country when it comes to languages. Usually people are very much surprised and awestruck when they find out that there are 22 official and numerous unofficial spoken languages in India and hundreds of dialects. Same rule applies to Rajasthan. Rajasthani is not one language. There are at least 18 spoken tongues or dialects in Rajasthan. It is still not settled that if they should be considered each a languages or a dialects. Then there are subdialects. These dialects are based on geographical area but also sometimes on the community or caste one is from. Word Rajasthani language was first used by Grierson who used the word “Rajasthani” to refer to the languages spoken in Rajasthan in the Linguistic Survey of India, published in 1908:

“Rajasthani means literally the language of Rajasthan….The name as connoting a language has been invented for the purposes of this survey in order to distinguish it from Western Hindi on the one hand and from Gujarati on the other.”

There has been a lot of push in Rajasthan to get national recognition for Rajasthani language. But it is still not part of 22 official languages of India. Though in Rajasthan, it is an unofficial second language. It is taught in universities and offered as an elective subject in some schools. The problem is that there is not one Rajasthani language so question arises which dialect to choose? How do you decide which dialect is worth promoting and others not?
More on different dialects and Rajasthan government’s effort to create a Unicode for Rajasthani language in my next blog…..Don’t forget to come back and check!