As discussed yesterday, I’d be regularly writing posts that will expose you to the Mewari dialect.
Mewari is the second most prominent dialect of Rajasthan after Marwari. It belongs to the family of Indo-Aryan languages. There are only half a million people alive on this planet who can speak this dialect today.
According to the Wikipedia , there are 31 consonants, 10 vowels and 2 dipthongs in Mewari. But as I stated yesterday, Mewari is a dialect, a spoken language; it has no script of its own. However, there have been several poets and writers in Mewar who created their writings in Devanagari script as this is the script used for Hindi and Sanskrit languages. So all these talk of consonants and vowels is related to this script.
Since the Mewar region of Rajasthan is close to Gujarat state, Mewari is influenced by Gujarati to a large extent. In fact, if you know Gujarati language, you will find it very easy to learn Mewari. In fact, many of its words will sound you familiar.
Since no grammar rules have ever been written for Mewari language, I’ll like to avoid this part. I don’t intend to make you some literary expert in Mewari but to get some working knowledge of it.
On a wider frame, it may be helpful to you to know that most sentence structure of Mewari are in SOV format as compared to English’s SVO word order. SOV order implies that Object will come right after the Subject and Verb will complete the rest of the sentence.
e.g. the English sentence “You read a newspaper” is in SVO order (Subject-Verb-Object).
If I translate this in Mewari, it will become in SOV order (Subject-Object-Verb) order as:
“thu akhbaar vaanch”.
Here, you can decode the vocabulary as:
You = thu / थू
Newspaper = akhbaar / अखबार
Read = vaanch / वाँच
Please note that I won't be using phonetic symbols for Mewari words. I didn't learn English through phonetic symbols either. Try to pronounce it as it is written. If you are curious about the exact pronunciation, I'm writing it in Devanagari script. You can learn to pronounce Devanagari symbols instead of phonetic symbols, in case you are very concerned of right pronunciation. But as a beginner, it won't matter much.
To start with, if you only focus on learning the verbs & some common pronouns, you will be able to speak Mewari. Because most of the nouns people use are either from Hindi or English, yet if they complete the sentence with a Mewari verb, it is said to be a Mewari dialogue.
So I won’t be dividing my posts in lessons. You can read the posts in any order as per your wish. I’ll introduce you some new words in every post. The whole idea is to give you some exposure to Mewari. Let’s see how far we can take it from here.
Shall we start from next week?