Odia Language

Odia language, also spelled Oriya, Indo-Aryan language with some 50 million speakers. A language officially recognized, or “scheduled,” in the Indian constitution, it is also the main official language of the Indian state of Odisha (Oriya). The language has several dialects; Mughalbandi (Coastal Odia) is the standard dialect and the language of education.

Oldest of the eastern group of the Indo-Aryan family, Odia is derived from Ardhamagadhi Prakrit. Odia arguably dates back to the 10th century ce, though it was almost indistinguishable from Bengali until the 11th century. The first poetic classic was composed in the 15th century, and literary prose began to take shape in the 18th century.

Odia has been heavily influenced by the Dravidian languages as well as Arabic, Persian, and English. Its lexicon has been enriched by borrowings from these languages as well as from Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, French, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. Words borrowed from Sanskrit occur in two forms: tatsama (close to the original form) and tadbhava (remote from the original form).

Odia allows compounding, but unlike Sanskrit it does not allow elision. The use of compounds is more a feature of written than of spoken Odia. Odia has 6 pure vowels, 9 diphthongs, 28 consonants (3 of them retroflex), 4 semivowels, and no consonant-ending words. The written form uses three diacritics: visarga, anusvara, and candrabindu.

Odia grammar distinguishes between singular and plural number; first, second, and third person; and masculine and feminine gender, although the gender of the noun has no morphological consequences for the pronoun and the verb. It is an inflectionally rich language. Nominals carry number and case inflections, while adjectives carry inflections indicating degree and, for the tatsama adjectives, gender.

Odia is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language with a three-tier tense system. The finite verb agrees with its subject in person and number and also marks the honorific form. The main moods are indicative, imperative, interrogative, and subjunctive. The copula does not surface if the sentence is in the present tense. It is possible for main clauses—and some subordinate clauses—to be without a subject.

In Odia inscriptions from between the 12th and the 14th century, word order is relatively free, and verb–object sequence (with the subject before or after) is not infrequent. Other historical changes include the loss of some plural markers and some postpositions. The indirect speech, relative clauses, and passive constructions found in English have emerged in Odia, although these are considered nonstandard forms. New discursive forms such as the essay and news reporting and analysis have also come to Odia from English. Scholarly speech and writing still remain fairly Sanskritized, however.