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Language Information

Oriya is spoken in eastern India, principally in the state of Orissa, which faces the Bay of Bengal. It is closely related to Bengali, spoken to the north, and thus also belongs to the Indic branch of the Indo-European family. The distinctive Oriya script lacks the continuous horizontal top line of other Indian languages, most of its letters containing a large semicircle at the top. To one not familiar with the alphabet many of the letters appear at first glance to look alike. There are about 30 million speakers of Oriya. It is one of the official provincial languages recognized by the Indian constitution.

Family: Indo-European
Subgroup: Indo-Iranian
Branch: Indic

Writing Sample

Translation

In the southern regions there was a kingdom called Sindhu. Its ruler was a rajah named Birobahu. He had two queens. The older queen was called Premosila, the younger Konokomonjori. The younger queen was very beautiful and the rajah doted upon her, but the older queen he didn't care for at all. It happened that after a while the older queen gave birth to a son. Learning of this, the younger queen thought to herself, "She has borne a son who will rule someday. The first chance the rajah gets he will probably banish me from the kingdom. What am I going to do now?"

MAHFSVARA MISRA, Tales of Abolakara