Nepali

• Language Family: Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, Northern Zone (Eastern Pahari)

Speakers

According to the 2011 Census of India, there are approximately 2.92 million native Nepali speakers residing in India. Globally, it is spoken by over 15 million people, primarily in Nepal.

Distribution in India

Nepali is one of the officially recognized languages of India (under the Eighth Schedule). It is primarily spoken in: * Sikkim (where it serves as a major lingua franca) * West Bengal (particularly in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts) * Assam * Uttarakhand * Himachal Pradesh

Major grammatical features

• Phonology: Features a contrast between dental and retroflex stops, aspirated and unaspirated consonants, and distinctive vowel nasalization.
• Morphology: Highly agglutinative and inflectional. Nouns are marked for grammatical gender (primarily masculine/feminine, though feminine agreement is undergoing simplification in some spoken registers), number, and case via postpositions. Verbs are highly inflected, agreeing with the subject in person, number, gender, and multiple levels of honorific status (low, middle, high, and royal).
• Syntax: Strictly follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) default word order. It exhibits split-ergativity, where the ergative clitic (-le) is typically marked on subjects of transitive verbs in perfective aspects.

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Nepali language
• Glottolog Entry for Nepali
• ISO 639-3 Standard