Birhor Language Resource

Part of CoRSAL

Part of the Living Tongues Institute Collection

About the Collection

The Birhor people are a forest-dependent, semi-nomadic tribal community with fewer than 20,000 members concentrated in the eastern central Indian state of Jharkhand and adjacent northern parts of the state of Odisha. The research team at Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has worked closely with the Birhor tribal community in India since 2015. With data that was primarily collected between 2018 and 2021, the collection contains images, a trilingual Birhor-Hindi-English dictionary, a survey of ethnobotanical knowledge, and the first-ever children’s book in the Birhor language.

This collection contains some of the first-ever collected materials on this fascinating Kherwarian Munda language. Living Tongues researchers worked with Birhor Indigenous experts to document their fragile and now disappearing knowledge domains and produce the publications found in this collection. Many people played an important role in the documentation process: Anil Birhoɽ, Bishwanath Birhoɽ, Kameshwar Birhoɽ, Etwa Birhoɽ, Birsa Birhoɽ, Bitni Birhoɽ, Madhuri Birhoɽ, Malti Birhoɽ, Kaushila Birhoɽ, Seema Birhoɽ, and others. The Birhor community members’ knowledge of medicinal and nutritional uses of forest products is vast. They are known as specialists in natural vine fiber rope-making.

Only a few thousand fluent speakers of the Birhor language [ISO code: biy] remain at present, and the language is critically endangered. While the older community members still speak Birhor and use it among themselves, the younger people are shifting to local Hindi varieties. They speak Birhor only to a limited degree, frequently migrating to nearby towns in Jharkhand state for economic purposes. Even the speech of the elders reflects the influence of pronounced language contact. The Birhoɽ language has many loan words from local Indo-Aryan varieties including kin terms, numerals above two, and even grammatical markers like the object case form.

It is hoped that this Birhoɽ research, in particular the dictionary, will assist the younger generations of Birhoɽ people to acquaint themselves with their ancestral language that is on the verge of extinction, and be a part of the movement that might contribute towards the protection and revival of their heritage language. The ethnobotanical survey is also invaluable. By shedding light on certain lesser-known useful plants and new uses of many known plants, this book will be useful for a diverse group of readers including future generations of Birhoɽ students and teachers as well as linguists, ecologists, ethnobotanists, herbalists, natural therapy experts and other enthusiasts who are interested in traditional therapies. This study will help create awareness about the many roles of plants in the culture and health of the Birhoɽ people.

The materials in this collection were created with support from the Zegar Family Foundation.