ORIYA LANGUAGE
Oriya is one of the many regional languages of India belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European. It was born in what is now the state of Orissa in the northeast of the country at a period when political fragmentation was giving way to a unified kingdom under the Oriental Ganga dynasty (10-11th centuries), a time that also saw the flourishing of a major style of Hindu architecture.

DISTRIBUTION: Oriya is spoken mainly in the states of Orissa and Chhattisgarh in eastern India. There also significant numbers of Oriya speakers in Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam.
 Oriya has 6 vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning.Oriya has been heavily influenced by the Dravidian languages as well as Arabic, Persian, and English. Its lexicon has been enriched by borrowings from these languages as well as from Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, French, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. Words borrowed from Sanskrit occur in two forms: tatsama (close to the original form) and tadbhava (remote from the original form).

Around 38 million in the following Indian states:

                                            

                                                                    

Orissa

Chhattisgarh

Jharkhand

Andhra Pradesh

Assam

West Bengal

Gujarat

 

35,400,000

950,000

543,000

390,000

268,000

216,000

142,000