Imperial Gazetteer of India (Volume 10)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Oriya was spoken by 1,600,000 persons, or 13 per cent. of the population in 1901, but the transfer of Sambalpur and the adjoining Feudatory States to Bengal has reduced this figure to 292,000. Rather more than 100,000 persons, mainly in the south of Chanda District, spoke Telugu in 1901. The cession of three taluks of Sironcha to Madras will diminish this number by nearly one-fifth. The only other languages of any importance are those of the primitive Dravidian or Munda tribes. They are now represented by 1,100,000 speakers, or rather more than 9 per cent. of the population. Of these, nearly 900,000 speak Gondi and 60,000 Korku. The numbers returned as speaking these languages represent only 40 per cent. of the total numbers of the tribes, and this fact indicates the extent to which they have abandoned their own speech and adopted the Aryan vernaculars current around them. The following table shows the languages spoken in British Districts in 1891 and 1901: ? I89I.1901.Languages spoken.Number of persons.Number of persons.( Hindi Chief vernaculars of J Marathi the Province . j Oriya iTelugn Dravidian dialects . Munda dialects Gipsy dialects Other Asiatic languages Non-Asiatic languages6,702,023 2,118,614 685,971 101,311 1,007,004 101,750 23,9136, lI1, Ol62,106,8727,635 93,856 730,097 74,30536,596 7,11220,210 29,664 7,99'Total .10,784,2949,876,646The Province has received successive waves of immigration from the territories adjoining it on all sides. In many castes endogamous divisions have grown up, separating the older and newer immigrants. Social position is here in inverse ratio to length of residence in the country, the earlier immigrants being suspected, probably with justice, of interbreeding with the non-Aryan tribes. Among the castes of high social rank, the minority only.