About Ho Languages

Ho Languages

Belonging to the family of Austroasiatic languages, Ho is a Munda language and its native speakers are mainly known by the phrase Ho people. According to the 2001 census of India, there resides more than approximately 1.05 million native speakers of the language in the country. Ho is also known by the names “Lanka Kol” and “Bihar Ho.”

These speakers mainly reside in the East Singbhum district of the Indian state of Jharkhand and in the Mayurbhanj district and Keonjhar district of the Indian state of Odisha. Ho language is derived from the literary term “Ho,” which means human.

The language is fundamentally written in Varang Kshiti script, although many times other popular scripts like Latin, Devanagiri, as well as Odiya too are used to write Ho language. However, the native speakers of Ho try to be particular about the exclusive usage of only Varang Kshiti script for any write-ups in Ho language.

Coming to the lexical aspects, Ho language is quite similar to the Mundari language. But there are a lot of differences between their native speakers in terms of their ethnic identities. In terms of dialect too, Ho language shares a lot of similarities with the Mayurbhanj district in Odisha’s dialect of Mundari language.