Linguistic Diversity Challenge: 5/6
What is the language called in English and the language itself?
The language is called Paniya (or Pania, Paniyan, or Panyah) in English and പാണിയ /paːɳija/ or പാണിയഭാഷ /paːɳijabʰaːʂa/ (lit. ‘Paniya language’) in the language itself.
Where is the language spoken?
The language is spoken in the Wayanad, Kozhikode, Kannur, and Malappuram districts in Kerala, with other smaller populations in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
How many people speak the language?
About 22,000 people speak the language, with the vast majority of these living in Kerala.
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?
It’s a Dravidian language and is very closely related to Malayalam (it’s categorized as a Malayalam language, like Beary or Judeo-Malayalam).
What writing system does the language use?
The writing system depends on where the speaker is from, but it uses either Tamil, Kannada, or Malayalam script.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have?
As far as I can tell, the language is very similar to Malayalam grammatically, with most of the differences appearing in the lexicon. That being said, it’s almost impossible to find a rigorous survey of the language from a linguistic perspective, so I can’t really say. It most likely shares things like clusivity, animacy in its genders, a large number of cases, etc. but I’m not sure if it has any unique grammatical features because I literally can’t find anything about it that actually talks about its linguistic features.
What does the language sound like?
Once again, resources are pretty scarce, although I’d venture to say it’s probably similar to Malayalam.
What do you personally find interesting about the language?
It’s not really a thing about the language itself, but looking into this language, I basically had my first experience with a language where there’s literally just no good linguistic materials available online (even papers). It was really frustrating, but also definitely made me realize the importance of having linguists working on languages, making sure they get documented, and also the importance of treating all languages as complete and divorced from the linguist’s and society’s beliefs. Looking into Paniya and how biased and/or incomplete the resources were made me appreciate the abundance of resources and documentation for all the languages I’ve studied, and also makes me want to rectify that lack of resources in languages that need it.
Bonus!
A video in Malayalam and Paniya, if you want to hear how the language sounds and see some speakers (or if you speak Malayalam and want to tell me what’s going on because I don’t speak well enough to understand it)
