Tharu (Nepali: थारु) or Tharuhati (Nepali: थरुहटी) are terms used in Nepal and also in India for the loose collection of dialects spoken by Tharu people in Nepal's Inner and Outer Terai and in nearby parts of India's states Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The Tharu have have lived long enough in lands rendered marshy and intensely malarial by rivers and groundwater percolating out of the Siwalik foothills to have evolved resistance enough to live where most ethnic groups could not before the arrival of quinine and DDT. Thus the Tharu may already have been in place before the first Indo-Aryan incursions more than three thousand years ago, or even before the population of the higher hills to the north by Tibeto-Burman peoples. Nevertheless the surviving Tharu dialects are strictly Indo-Aryan languages without known remnants of anything more ancient.
Dialects spoken west of the Gandaki River are called Dangaura (Chaudary), Kathoriya, Rana, and Buksa are mutually intelligible apart from their geographic extremes, and are spoken by about 1.3 million. Sonha is largely mutually intelligible with Dangauru.
Just east of the Gandaki Chitwania (Nawalparasi) has a quarter million speakers in and around Chitwan Valley. In eastern Nepal Kochila is also spoken by a quarter million. Kochila is dialectically diverse, but the dialects are only recorded according to the name of the local district. Many ethnic Kochila have adopted Maithili.
On the ground, it becomes more difficult to say exactly what a given person speaks. Tharu languages form a dialect continuum so nearby villages have no difficulty understanding each other, even if they may be formally assigned different dialects. With greater separation distance, communication becomes more difficult even within the same nominal dialect.
Tharu languages also exist in continuum with adjacent Indo-Aryan languages. In the west, Tharuhati intermingles with Hindi languages particularly Awadhi. East of the Gandaki Tharuhati intermingles with Bihari languages Bhojpuri, then Maithili further east.
Famous quotes containing the word languages:
“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
—J.G. (James Graham)