- Official language in
- India
- Script
- Devanagari
Where it's spoken
Konkani is described as the official language of the state of Goa, the only region where it is spoken by a majority of the population. Outside Goa it is described as a minority language spoken in different varieties along a narrow strip of the west coast, from the state of Maharashtra in the north, through Goa, to much of coastal Karnataka in the south, with small pockets in and near Pune and Mumbai and in Cochin in the state of Kerala.
The Government of Goa states that the Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act makes Konkani in the Devanagari script the sole official language of Goa, and that Marathi may also be used for all or any of the official purposes. Konkani is also one of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to India's constitution.
Peterson and Mopkar, citing the Ethnologue, describe Konkani as a "macro-language": multiple closely related individual languages that are deemed in some usage contexts to be a single language, so that the varieties across the region can show considerable differences. They use the name "Standard Goan Konkani" for the socially recognized standard form of Goan Konkani, which they say has a stable, agreed-upon orthography.
Sources
- Government of Goa, Directorate of Information and Publicity — "Languages of Goa" — Official Language Act and use of Marathi
- Constitution of India (1949, as amended; text as reproduced by the Comparative Constitutions Project) — Eighth Schedule, item 9
- Peterson, John & Govind Mopkar (2024). "Delineating a case system: How many cases are there in Standard Goan Konkani – and why?" Lingua Posnaniensis 66(1): 49–78 — p. 50
Script & pronunciation
This app's Konkani cards are written in the Devanagari script, which the Unicode Standard lists among the scripts used to write Konkani. In Devanagari, the signs called bindus, which include the anusvara ं, are described as indicating nasalization or final nasal closure of a syllable. The card रेल्वे स्टेशन खंय आसा? ("Where is the railway station?") writes the nasal in खंय with this sign, and its romanization khaṃy renders the sign as ṃ.
The Unicode code chart notes that the vowel sign ि, DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I, stands to the left of the consonant. This app's card एक तिकेट दिवात ("One ticket, please.") shows the pattern in तिकेट and दिवात, whose romanization is tikeṭ and divāt.
Sources
- The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0.0 — Core Specification, Chapter 12: South and Central Asia-I — Section 12.1.1 (languages written in Devanagari); combining marks (bindus)
- The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0 — Code Charts, Devanagari (U0900–U097F) — DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I "stands to the left of the consonant"
Grammar essentials
Peterson and Mopkar describe Standard Goan Konkani as a verb-final language with a split ergative alignment: the subject of a transitive verb appears in the ergative in the simple past tense and in the perfect, and in the nominative in the other finite verb forms such as the present and the future. The app's card for the verb करप ("To do / make") has a note that in the perfective the subject takes the ergative -ें.
All Konkani nouns are described as having an inherent grammatical gender, masculine, feminine or neuter, and two stems, called direct and oblique. Case markers and postpositions attach to the oblique stem. This app's cards show the gender at work in the word "my": म्हजें नांव ... ("My name is ...") uses the neuter form म्हजें, and म्हजो फोन नंबर ... ("My phone number is ...") uses the masculine form म्हजो. The first card also notes that no verb for "is" is needed.
The authors list a case marker =k, which they label "objective" in their examples, as in "to the city". This app's card म्हाका पयशे बदलपाक जाय ("I want to exchange money") has a word breakdown that glosses म्हाका as "to me" and जाय as "needed".