Surgujia dialect

Surgujia is an Indo-Aryan language variety spoken in Chhattisgarh. It belongs to the Eastern Hindi group. It is often considered as a dialect of Chattisgarhi language.

Surgujia
सरगुजिया
Native to	India
Region	Chhattisgarh
Native speakers	1.74 million (2011 census)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Central Eastern Hindi Chhattisgarhi Surgujia
Writing system	Devanagari[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	sgj
Glottolog	surg1246

Speakers

Surgujia is primarily spoken in Surguja, Jashpur, and Koriya districts of Chhattisgarh; and to a lesser extent in Raigarh and Korba.

Speakers of Surgujia have often been conflated with those of Chhattisgarhi. Furthermore, as is the case with many Hindi languages and other regional languages, Surgujia has often been subsumed under the all-encompassing bracket of Standard Hindi due to erroneous, arbitrary or politically-motivated categorisation.

Classification

It was previously regarded by many as a dialect of Chhattisgarhi, and was designated as such by the linguist George A. Grierson in his comprehensive Linguistic Survey of India.^[3][4] Indeed, Surgujia possesses a lexical similarity of 71%-76% with Chhattisgarhi, according to Ethnologue.^[5] In recent times, however, Surgujia has come to be recognised as a distinct dialect.^{[citation needed]}