इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Chhattisgarh Plains · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Chhattisgarhi is not a dialect of standard Hindi. It belongs to the Eastern Hindi group, with Awadhi and Bagheli, while standard Hindi descends from Western Hindi — so it is a cousin of the standard, not a deviation from it. It carries the Eastern Hindi third-person past in -is, so a verb behaves as it does in Awadhi and Bhojpuri rather than as it does in Delhi. Around 16.2 million people returned it in the 2011 Census, and it was made an official language of the state alongside Hindi in 2007. Its written literature is recent and datable: Pandit Sundarlal Sharma's Chhattisgarhi Danleela of 1898 is conventionally taken as the first modern literary work in the language, which means everything before it — Pandwani, Chandaini, Bharthari, the whole Nacha repertoire — existed only as performance. The northern fringe is where it gets interesting: on the Sarguja rise, Sadri works as a lingua franca, Kurukh is Dravidian, and Korwa is Austroasiatic, so three language families meet within a couple of districts.
बोलियाँ
The Raipur, Durg and Bemetara register, treated as the standard because it is what broadcasting and publishing use.
बोलने वाले: Part of the roughly 16.2 million who returned Chhattisgarhi in 2011
The northern-plain variety around Bilaspur, Janjgir and Ratanpur; the register in which most Panthi and Bharthari repertoire is sung.
The eastern variety towards Raigarh and the Mahanadi gorge, shading into Sambalpuri and Odia. Speakers here are routinely bilingual and the vocabulary moves in both directions.
The northern fringe variety, in contact with Sadri and with the Chota Nagpur languages, and noticeably different from the plain's speech in intonation.
Not a Chhattisgarhi variety but the trade and inter-community lingua franca of the Sarguja and Jashpur belt, shared with Jharkhand — the language people use when their first languages belong to different families.
Spoken by Oraon households in Jashpur and the northern districts. A second Dravidian island in central India, unrelated to Chhattisgarhi and related distantly to Gondi far to the west.
Spoken in pockets of the Sarguja and Jashpur hills, with relatives on the Chota Nagpur plateau. Its presence is why the northern fringe of a rice plain holds three language families at once.
स्थानीय शब्दावली
| शब्द | अर्थ |
|---|---|
| Basi बासी | Cooked rice kept overnight under water, and by extension the meal built around it. |
| Borey बोरे | The same dish made with fresh water and eaten immediately, without the overnight souring. |
| Kanhar, matasi, dorsa, bhata कन्हार, मटासी, दोरसा, भाटा | The farmers' soil classes, from heavy black clay through yellow loam and mixed soil to gravelly upland. Each takes a different set of rice varieties and a different sowing method, and the words are far older than any soil survey. |
| Bhaji भाजी | Any leafy green, of which the region names several dozen, each with a fortnight of season. The word is doing the work that a vegetable market does elsewhere. |
| Badi and bijori बड़ी, बिजौरी | Sun-dried lentil and ash-gourd dumplings, made in summer for the monsoon. |
| Bandha बंधा | The village tank. In a plain whose river rises inside it, the bandha is the oldest and most important piece of infrastructure, and most villages are named in relation to one. |
| Gedi गेड़ी | Bamboo stilts walked by children from Hareli through the monsoon — nominally to keep out of the mud, in practice a season-long competition. |
| Jaitkhamb जैतखंभ | The white pillar with a white flag that marks a Satnami settlement and stands at the centre of the Panthi dance. |
| Gadwa baja गड़वा बाजा | The drum-and-shawm ensemble that plays for Raut Nacha — nishan, timki, mohri and dafda — with a fixed instrumentation the dance cannot be performed without. |
| Gammat गम्मत | The comic interlude inside a Nacha performance, improvised and usually topical. |
| Sohari सोहारी | The ghee-fried wheat bread of ritual meals, and by extension the feast itself. |
| Nawakhai नवाखाई | The first eating of the new rice, offered to the household and village deities before anyone in the house may eat it. |
| Chherchhera छेरछेरा | The Pausha Purnima custom of going door to door for grain from the harvested crop, and the name of the day itself. |
| Johar जोहार | The greeting, shared across the central Indian forest belt into Jharkhand and Odisha. It marks a cultural zone more accurately than any boundary does. |
कहावतें
| कहावत | शाब्दिक अर्थ | अर्थ |
|---|---|---|
| Chher chhera, koti ke dhan la her tera | Chherchhera — take out from the store the grain that is yours | The chant children sing at doorways at Pausha Purnima, when households give away paddy from the fresh harvest. The wording varies from village to village, but the transaction does not: the grain is given because it has just been received. |
| Bhojli | The sprouted seedling | Two girls who exchange bhojli leaves at the Bhadon immersion address each other as bhojli afterwards rather than by name. A ritual friendship formed in one afternoon and, by custom, not dissolved. |
| The doha at the door | — | A Raut Nacha dancer stops at a house and recites a couplet that praises and needles the household in the same breath. The household is expected to hear it out and reward it. Once a year, the herders get to say to the cultivators what they cannot say the rest of the time. |
Chhattisgarh Plains की बोलियाँ, स्थानीय शब्दावली और कहावतें। (17)