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Malto Language
Belonging to the branch of northern-Dravidian languages, Malto is primarily spoken by the Sauria Paharia community, residing in the eastern states of India.
The geographical distribution of the language is such that it is spoken by the community Sauria Paharia community living in states like Bihar, Jharkhand, as well as West Bengal. Other than these, it is also spoken by the community residing in the neighboring country of Bangladesh.
The Malto language consists of two varieties and these varieties are often treated as separate languages.
The first one is the Kumarbhag Paharia, mainly spoken in the state of West Bengal and Jharkhand, and also some puny parts of the Odisha state; and the other one is the Sauria Paharia, spoken in Bihar as well as West Bengal, and also some remote parts of Bangladesh. Both languages have a lexical similarity of around 80%.
Out of the two, it is the Sauria Paharia variety that is more popular having more than thousands of speakers compared to the Kumarbhag Paharia variety. It also has around four dialects: Litipara, Godda, Sahibganj, and Hiranpur. The Kumarbhag variety, on the other hand, has no dialects.
Coming to the scripts used for write-ups in Malto language, it used the Bengali script as well as the Devanagiri script.