Konkani Language

Konkani Language, one of the official state languages of Goa state in western India and also spoken in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Kerala. In 1999 it had 4 million mother-tongue speakers. An Indo-Aryan language (see Indo-Iranian Languages), it belongs to the Southern Zone sub-group. It has many dialects including Parabhi, Koli, and Thakuri, all of which are closely related. There is no standard dialect for writing Konkani. In the early 20th century the language was classed as a dialect of Marathi by the Indian Government, until it was recognized as a language in its own right in the census of 1931. Konkani was written into the Indian constitution as an official state language in 1992.

The Devanagari alphabet (the script of the primary official language in India, Hindi) was made the official script for Konkani in an effort to unite the language and improve literacy in it. Previously it did not have a common script (although the Brahmi script was used by many initially) and was, and still is, written in the script relating to the area in which it was spoken, for example, Kannada, Roman, Arabic, or Malayalam scripts. As a consequence, literature is scarce in the Konkani language although publications dating from the 17th century do exist. In the late 16th century a grammar of Konkani, one of the first grammars of an Indian language other than Sanskrit, was written anonymously.

Konkani has 13 vowel sounds and 33 consonants. Although much of its grammar reflects the grammar of other Indo-Aryan languages, unlike these it has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Adjectives agree with the noun that they qualify in gender and number, and verbs are normally positioned at the end of sentences.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.