Santali language, aMunda language spoken primarily in the east-central Indian states ofWest Bengal,Jharkhand, andOrissa. At the turn of the 21st century there were approximately 6 million speakers of Santali, some 4.8 million of whom lived inIndia, more than 150,000 inBangladesh, and about 40,000 in tea districts inNepal. In India more than 2 million Santals lived in Jharkhand, nearly 2 million in West Bengal, several hundred thousand in Orissa, and about 100,000 inAssam.

Santali includes a northern and a southerndialect. It is the major member of a sub-group of the Kherwarian branch of North Munda. Kherwarian also includes Mundari and Ho, each with about one million speakers. Santali is an official scheduledlanguage of India.

The self-designation of the Santals ishɔṛ ‘man’ orhɔṛ hɔpɔn ‘sons of mankind.’ They also use the termmañjhi/mãjhi ‘headman’ as an ethnonym. They call their languagehɔṛ rɔṛ. In northern West Bengal, Santali is known asjaŋli orpaharia, in southern West Bengal and Orissa asṭ^haṛ, and in Jharkhand asparsi.

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Among the noteworthycharacteristics of Santaliphonology is the use of “checked” or preglottalized consonants in final position, as insεc̆’ ‘towards’ anddak’ ‘water.’ In terms ofmorphology, Santali makes extensive use of suffixes and infixes, but prefixes are found only in a small number of “frozen” forms. Nouns are divided into animate and inanimate stems; inanimate stems may take a locational or directional suffix.

The Santali verb is quite complex, with suffixes for subject, tense and aspect, transitivity, various kinds of objects, possessor, and finiteness. Subject is frequently marked on the word immediately preceding the verb and may even be a subject pronoun itself. Thus, “yes I will go” is renderedhε^~ ‘yes’ +iñ-iñ ‘I (first person singular subject) +c̆ala’k-a ‘go (finite),’ and “they killed my pig” is renderedsukri-ko ‘pig (third person plural)’ +gɔ’c̆-ke-d-e-tiñ-a ‘die (aorist–transitive–third person singular object–first person singular possessive–finite)’. The language has been written in numerous scripts:roman,Devanagari, and theindigenous script known colloquially as Ol Cemet.