Neelam speaking Kurux
This video was recorded by Daniel Bögre Udell in Delhi, India. Commonly referred to as Kurukh, the Kurux language is spoken by over 2,200,000 native speakers of the Oraon and Kisan tribes in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bihar, and West Bengal in India. In addition, many speakers of Kurux live in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Of the Kurux dialects, Oraon and Kisan are largely intelligible to speakers. Kurux is taught as an academic subject in several Indian states, including Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam. The Kurux language is written with the Devanagari script, which is used for other Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi. Additionally, there exists an alphabetic Tolong Siki script, which was invented by Dr. Narayan Oraon in 1999. Since then, Tolong Siki has been used to publish a variety of books and magazines, was advocated for by the Kurukh Literary Society of India, and became recognized officially by the state of Jharkhand.