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Mundari is a Munda languages of the Austroasiatic language family spoken by the Munda people tribes in eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal and northern Rangpur Division of Bangladesh. It is closely related to Ho language and Santali language. Mundari Bani, a script specifically to write Mundari, was invented by Rohidas Singh Nag. "Adivasi. Volume 52. Number 1&2. June&December 2012". Page 22 It has also been written in the Devanagari, Oriya script, Bengali alphabet, and Latin script writing systems.
| Historical speaker of Mundari language variety | ||||||
| (+3.6) | ||||||
| (+13.8) | ||||||
| (+20.0) | ||||||
| (+6.7) | ||||||
| Source: Census of India | ||||||
Mundari is spoken in the Khunti district, Ranchi district, Seraikela Kharsawan and West Singhbhum, East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, and in the Mayurbhanj, Kendujhar, Sundargarh district of Odisha by at least 1.1 million people. Another 500,000, mainly in Odisha and Assam, are recorded in the census as speaking "Munda," potentially another name for Mundari.
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| Mother |
| Father |
| Brother |
| Sister |
| Sister/brother of sister/brother in law |
| Friend |
| Son |
| Daughter |
| Does |
| Write |
| Talk |
| Read |
| Look / see |
| Come along with |
| Found |
| Run |
| Hold |
| Count |
| Measure |
| Cut |
| Sweet |
| Hard |
| Soft |
| Sun |
| Moon |
| Stars |
| Sky |
| Earth |
| cloud |
| Air/Wind |
| Sands |
| Dust |
| Muddy |
| Body |
| Grass |
| Tree |
| Leaf |
| Branches of Tree |
Similar issues with word class distinction have been also reported in other Munda languages, especially North Munda (Santali language (Bodding 1929, Ghosh 1994, Neukom 2001), Ho language (Deeney 1978), Korku language (Drake 1903, Zide (undated)), Kharia language (Pinnow 1960, Peterson 2003), Juang language. Grierson (1906) summarized the issue in his Linguistic Survey of India:
Modern typologist interest in Mundari lexical categories was revitalized by Cook (1965), Langendoen (1967), Sinha (1975), Osada (1992), Bhat (1994), and most famously Evans & Osada (2005). Evans & Osada challenged the flexible analysis, contending instead that Mundari exhibits distinct yet exceptionally fluid grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). Their argument rests upon three specific criteria for assessing flexibility: (i) explicit semantic compositionality across both argument and predicate functions, (ii) bidirectionality, and (iii) exhaustiveness. This research prompted an extensive series of peer reviews and criticism within the same volume of Linguistic Typology. Notwithstanding these debates, Osada (1992), Badenoch & Osada (2019), and Badenoch et al. (2019) identify ideophone as a further open lexical class in Mundari, encompassing a minimum of 1,500 lemmas. Mark Dingemanse comments: "yet the status of this considerable lexical stratum in the language has not featured in any word-class debates."
This section will leave out the discussions on Mundari & North Munda flexibility and focus on the morphological differences between two main dialects, Hasadaʔ and Keraʔ, specifically in relation to their respective approaches to lexical flexibility.
In Hasadaʔ Mundari, entity-denoting lexemes and structures or "noun"-like, "noun phrase"-like, and "adjective"-like all can be used as semantic bases of predicates (i.e. "verbs") without derivation. The "verbal" constructions' semantic results are often compositional (predictable), but sometimes they can be idiosyncratic.
In contrast, Keraʔ Mundari does not allow such blatant uses of "zero-derivation" (i.e. conversion) like in Hasadaʔ and other dialects. Nouns can only used as verbs with the sense of performing the semantical action with the presence of verbalizing suffix -o/-u. For examples:
1. aɽandi "wedding"
1. sindri "vermillion"
Regarding the limit of flexibility, there is an infix -n- that can be inserted into certain Mundari lexemes, which "transforms the verb root into an abstract inanimate noun stem, which is no longer capable of verb inflection". Per Hengeveld & Rijkhoff (2005), citing Cook (1965)'s data:
dal "strike" → da-n-al "a blow"
dub "sit" → du-n-ub "a meeting"
ol "to write" → o-n-ol "the writing"
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