A Brief Introduction of the Turi Language of Eastern India

This article presents a brief introduction to the North Munda (Austro-Asiatic) language Turi, spoken by some 1,500 speakers throughout the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. After a brief introduction to the ethnic Turi group, we present a skeleton grammar of the Turi language as spoken in northwestern Odisha state, where it is still being learned by children as their home language. We then discuss the position of Turi within the Kherwarian (North Munda) group by comparing our lexical data for Turi with that for twelve other Kherwarian varieties as given in Kobayashi et al. (2003), using the software COG from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Our results suggest that Turi is a sister language to all of the dialects of Santali and that it together with these forms the Santali-Turi branch of Kherwarian. We end with a discussion of the possible consequences of these results for the linguistic and ethnic prehistory of eastern central India.