Rawat

Rawat (Raute), or "Jangali" (Jungle), is a small Sino-Tibetan language of India. It is spoken in 9 villages north of Askot in Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand, India (Ethnologue) as well as in several villages in Dadeldhura District, Nepal and Darchula District, Nepal.

Rawat (pronounced "raut") is a semi-agglutinative language, and features SOV sentences with either monosyllabic or less frequently di-syllabic noun heads and verb stems. Verbs are modified with various particles, including nominalizers, causatives, tense, aspect, person, number and other generally stem final particles. The noun heads have plurals, locatives, deictics, ergatives, reflexives and other generally word-final case markings. Prefixed morphemes similar to adjectives also modify nouns and root-initial voiced/voiceless alternations signal the transitivity of verbs. An example is geda hluw hwã-ha-re (geda=child hluw=bathe hwã=Copula ha=progressive re=present tense) "The child is bathing" (Fortier 2019:139).

Ethnologue (2013) reports that Rawat has borrowed recent loanwords from local Indo-Aryan languages for terms for modern semantic domains (modern house types for example). The exonyms "Rawat", "Raute", and "Raji" all may derive from Indic words referring to "Kings (of the forest)". The people's endonym, name for themselves, is Bat-Tou (in Pithoragarh, India) and Bot-Tho (in Champawat, India) and Bot-Tou (in Dadeldhura, Nepal).

From Wikipedia · Rawat language · CC BY-SA 4.0