Oriya

Oriya

(ôrē`yə) or

Odia

(ôdē`ə), language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian.

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Oriya

 

a people in India; the main population of Orissa State. Population, 19,720,000 (1971, census). Their language is Oriya.

In ancient times the ancestors of the Oriya lived in Kalinga, and later they came under the Maurya and Gupta dynasties and the rule of Harsha (seventh century) and the Great Moguls (16th to 19th centuries). After India’s independence, the national territory of the Oriya became a separate state. More than 90 percent of the people live in villages and engage in farming (mainly rice and millet); palms and betel palms are also cultivated. The Oriya are skillful jewelers and stone carvers, and few engage in industrial work. About 95 percent of the Oriya are Hindus. The Oriya temples in Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konarak are among the finest examples of Indian art.

REFERENCE

Narody luzhnoi Azii. Moscow, 1963.

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Oriya

 

one of the main languages of India, spoken in Orissa State (eastern India) by 19.7 million people (1971 census).

Oriya belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-European language family. Dialect differentiation is weakly expressed; Bhatri, a transitional dialect between Oriya and Marathi, is distinctive. Phonologically, Oriya is opposed to the majority of its related languages by its retention of final short vowels. Morphologically it reflects a transition from inflectional to agglutinative structure. In noun inflection, the polysemous inflectional endings, which are traceable only in rudimentary forms, have given way to new monosemous affixes developed on the basis of auxiliary words. The verb conjugation, which in practice has preserved only one set of primary endings, is based mainly on secondary synthetic (participial) and analytic forms, in which the auxiliary verb is the inflected component. Written records of early Oriya date to the 11th to 13th centuries. Modern Oriya took shape in the mid-19th century. A special form of script is used for Oriya.

REFERENCE

Karpushkin, B. M. Iazyk oriia. Moscow, 1964.

G. A. ZOGRAF

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.