Mewati | |
---|---|
मेवाती میواتی | |
Native to | India |
Region | Mewat region |
Native speakers | 860,000 (2011 census)[1] Census results conflate most speakers with Hindi[2] |
Devanagari, Perso-Arabic | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | wtm |
Glottolog | mewa1250 |
Mewati (Devanagri: मेवाती; Perso-Arabic: میواتی) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly by the Meo people. It has three million speakers in the Mewat Region (Alwar and Bharatpur, districts of Rajasthan, and the Nuh district of Haryana). According to the 2023 Pakistani census, there are around 1.1 million Mewati speakers in Pakistan.[3] While other people groups in the region also speak the Mewati language, it is one of the defining characteristics of the Meo culture.[4]
There are 9 vowels, 31 consonants, and two diphthongs. Suprasegmentals are less prominent than they are in the other dialects of Rajasthani. There are two numbers; singular and plural. Two genders; masculine and feminine, and three cases; direct, oblique, and vocative. The nouns decline according to their final segments. Case marking is postpositional. Pronouns are traditional in nature and are inflected for number and case. Gender is not distinguished in pronouns. There are two types of adjectives. There are three tenses; past, present, and future. Participles function as adjectives.