Surgujia dialect

Surgujia is the Indo-Aryan dialect variety of the Chhattisgarhi language. It is mainly spoken in the Surguja region of Chhattisgarh. It is sometimes grouped in the Eastern Hindi group.

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 is 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]