Rawat language
Rawat (Raute), or "Jangali" (Jungle), is a small Sino-Tibetan language of India. It is spoken in 9 villages north of Askot in Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand, India (Ethnologue).
| Rawat | |
|---|---|
| Native to | India |
| Region | Uttarakhand |
| Ethnicity | Ban Rawats |
Native speakers | 670 (1998)[1] |
Sino-Tibetan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | jnl |
| Glottolog | rawa1264 |
Rawat (pronounced "rawt") is an agglutinative language, and features SOV sentences with generally monosyllabic noun heads and verb stems. Verbs are modified with various particles, including nominalizers, causatives, tense, aspect, person, number and other generally stem final particles. The noun heads have plurals, locatives, deictics, ergatives, reflexives and other generally word-final case markings. Prefixed morphemes similar to adjectives also modify nouns and root-initial voiced/voiceless alternations signal the transitivity of verbs.
Ethnologue (2013) reports that Rawat is heavily mixed with vocabulary from local Indo-Aryan languages and is "very similar to Raute and Raji". The similarity in names in not indicative: "Rawat", "Raute", and "Raji" all derive from "King (of the forest)", a common appellation of forest peoples in the region, and it is not certain that Rawat is actually a Sino-Tibetan language.