Lahul Lohar language
Language spoken in India
Lahul Lohar (also known as Lohari) is an unclassified Indo-Aryan language of northern India. It is spoken by about 750 people in the Lahul region of Himachal Pradesh and in the adjoining Leh district of Ladakh. It is distinct from Gade Lohar, though culturally similar.
Phonology
Sociolinguistic situation
According to a 1996 sociolinguistic survey, Lohari is spoken in about 85 households belonging to the metalsmith caste of Lahul. The largest concentration of Lohari speakers is in Gondhla where 12 Lohar families reside. Elsewhere in Lahul, it is typical for just one Lohar family to live in a village. Some Lohari speakers believe that their language resembles Chinali but not to the degree of mutual intelligibility. There exists a belief that Chinali is close to Sanskrit, whereas Lohari is more similar to Hindi. A sample of Lohari as spoken in Gondhla and Gawzang shows a 73 percent lexical similarity to the Chinali varieties of Gushal and Nalda. The similarity between the two varieties of Lohari is 82 percent.
“Lahul Lohar language” enters the record as language spoken in India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lahul, Lohar and language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lahul Lohar language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.