Nepali began as Khas kura, the speech of the Khas people of the Karnali hills. It is an Indo-Aryan language whose closest relatives are Kumaoni and Garhwali, spoken across the border in Uttarakhand. It became the administrative language of the Khas Malla kingdom based at Sinja, travelled east with the Gorkhali conquests, and was formally renamed Nepali only in the twentieth century.
The place is well covered elsewhere on this site: our guide to Sinja valley and the birthplace of the Nepali language describes the valley, how to reach it and what is standing. This article is about the language itself, which is a different subject and has a longer arc.
What Family Nepali Belongs To
Nepali is Indo-Aryan, which puts it in the same broad family as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Marathi, and ultimately in the same family as English, Greek and Persian. Within Indo-Aryan it sits in the northern or Pahari group, and its nearest relatives are not Hindi but Kumaoni and Garhwali, the hill languages of the districts immediately west of the Mahakali river.
That grouping is a piece of history in itself. Kumaon, Garhwal and the Nepali Karnali were a single cultural zone before the Treaty of Sugauli made the Kali river an international boundary in 1816. The languages had been drifting apart for centuries before that, but they drifted apart as neighbours rather than as strangers, which is why a Nepali speaker from Jumla will find Kumaoni broadly followable and Bengali not at all.
Nepali is also distinct in kind from most of the other languages spoken inside Nepal. Newar, Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Rai, Limbu, Sherpa and Thakali are Tibeto-Burman languages, an entirely different family. So are the languages of most of the high border valleys. Nepal is a country where the national language and the majority of its regional languages are not related to each other, which is unusual and has shaped a great deal of its politics.
The Four Names It Has Been Called
| Name | Meaning | Used when |
|---|---|---|
| Khas kura | The speech of the Khas | The oldest name, still used in the Karnali |
| Parbatiya | Of the hills, hill language | Common in older texts and outside accounts |
| Gorkhali | The language of Gorkha | After the Gorkhali conquests made it the state language |
| Nepali | The language of Nepal | Adopted in the twentieth century |
The renaming was deliberate and it was political. A language called Gorkhali is the language of one conquering hill state; a language called Nepali is the language of a country. The change was pushed through in the 1930s, when the body set up to publish and standardise it, founded in 1913 under a name referring to Gorkha, was renamed to refer to Nepal instead.
The older name Nepal Bhasa, confusingly, belongs to Newar, the Tibeto-Burman language of the Kathmandu valley, which had been called that for centuries. Two languages therefore have a strong claim on the word Nepali, and the fact that the hill language won the argument tells you who was running the state in the 1930s.
How Nepali Differs From Hindi in Practice
Travellers arriving with some Hindi often expect it to carry them through Nepal. It half does, and the half that fails is the half that matters in the west.
The script is shared, so a Hindi reader can sound out a Nepali sign and recognise a good deal of it. A large stock of vocabulary is shared too, because both languages draw on Sanskrit for anything abstract, formal or administrative. Numbers, days of the week, and the language of government and religion overlap closely enough to be useful straight away.
The parting of the ways is in the everyday layer. The verb systems are different enough that sentences do not map across cleanly, the pronouns and the levels of politeness attached to them do not correspond, and the common words for the things you actually need on a hill trail, food, weather, distance, family relations, are frequently unrelated. Nepali has also absorbed vocabulary from its Tibeto-Burman neighbours in a way Hindi has not, particularly for landscape features, crops and livestock in the high valleys.
The practical position is that Hindi will get you understood in the Tarai and in tourist businesses anywhere in the country, and will get you a polite blank look in a Karnali village. Fifty words of Nepali are worth more in the far west than fluent Hindi.
The Inscriptions at Dullu and Sinja
Written evidence for early Nepali is thin, scattered and hard to date, which is the honest position and worth stating before the specifics.
The oldest known texts in an identifiably early form of the language are inscriptions on stone from western Nepal, above all from Dullu in Dailekh district. They are conventionally assigned to the eleventh century, but the readings and the dating are debated among epigraphers, and different published accounts give different years. This site does not quote a single date for them for that reason.
What is not in doubt is what they represent. These are administrative and dedicatory texts, cut in stone, in a language recognisably ancestral to modern Nepali, produced in the western hills at a time when the Kathmandu valley was writing in Sanskrit and early Newar. The language was already a working medium of record in the Karnali before it was anything at all in the east.
The Sinja valley, above Jumla, carries inscribed stones from the Khas Malla court itself, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Khas Malla kings also left their mark well outside the Karnali: the Ashokan pillar at Lumbini carries an inscription of the Khas Malla king Ripu Malla, conventionally dated to 1312, which is a hard, checkable trace of how far the kingdom's reach extended.
How a Hill Language Was Written Down
Nepali is written in Devanagari, the same script as Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit. That was not inevitable and it was not sudden. The Khas Malla inscriptions use scripts of the Nagari family, the ancestor of modern Devanagari, which is what you would expect from a court in regular contact with the Indian plains and with Sanskrit as the language of learning.
Standardised Devanagari orthography for Nepali is much more recent. Printing, dictionaries and school textbooks did the standardising, mostly from the late nineteenth century onward, and mostly outside Nepal at first: Banaras and Darjeeling had presses and Nepali-reading populations before Kathmandu had either at scale. The Rana state was not enthusiastic about mass literacy, so a good deal of the early work of fixing the written language happened among Nepali speakers in India.
The 2015 constitution names Nepali in Devanagari as the official language of Nepal, and recognises all languages spoken as mother tongues in Nepal as national languages. The distinction matters: official language is the language of government business, national language is a status recognition, and the two are not the same thing.
How It Travelled East
A Karnali hill language became the language of the whole country by three mechanisms, in order.
First, conquest. The Gorkhali state that formed after 1768 ran its army, its revenue records and its land grants in this language. Officials posted from the hills to newly annexed districts worked in it, and anyone with business at the court needed it.
Second, settlement. Land grants to soldiers and officials moved hill families east and south across the country over several generations, and they took the language with them into districts where nobody had previously spoken it.
Third, school and state. From the mid twentieth century, education, radio, the civil service and the army all operated in Nepali, and for a long period the promotion of other languages was actively discouraged. That produced fluency very effectively and left a good deal of resentment, which is why language policy remains a live subject in Nepali politics and why the 2015 constitution is worded as carefully as it is.
At the 2021 census, around 44 per cent of the population reported Nepali as a mother tongue, which is a plurality rather than a majority. The proportion who speak it fluently as a first or second language is far higher. Nepali is also an official language of Sikkim, is widely spoken in Darjeeling and Bhutan, and has been a scheduled language of India since 1992.
What the Karnali Dialects Still Preserve
The varieties spoken in Jumla, Kalikot, Dailekh, Achham and Doti are not degraded versions of standard Nepali. In several respects they are more conservative, retaining verb forms, vocabulary and pronunciations that the standardised eastern-influenced form has lost. Linguists working on the history of Nepali have long treated the western dialects as important evidence precisely because they preserve older stages.
The everyday consequence is that a visitor with textbook Nepali will find Kalikot or Achham harder going than Pokhara, and should not assume that difficulty means anyone is speaking badly. Local speech in the far west also carries a substantial vocabulary that never made it into the standard language at all, much of it agricultural, and a good deal of it audible in the sung verse traditions described in our guides to Deuda and to the rodhighar.
There is a straightforward reason to record this. The pressure of school, radio, migration and mobile phones runs one way, and the western varieties are being levelled toward the standard faster than they are being documented.
Frequently Asked Questions
What language did Nepali come from?
Khas kura, the speech of the Khas people of the Karnali hills in western Nepal. It became the administrative language of the Khas Malla kingdom based at Sinja and evolved into modern Nepali over the following centuries.
Is Nepali related to Hindi?
Both are Indo-Aryan languages, so they are related, but not closely. Nepali's nearest relatives are Kumaoni and Garhwali, the hill languages of Uttarakhand immediately west of the Mahakali river.
Where was the Nepali language first spoken?
In the hills of the Karnali basin in western Nepal, in the districts now called Jumla, Kalikot, Dailekh and their neighbours, long before it was spoken in the Kathmandu valley.
When was it renamed Nepali?
In the twentieth century. It had been called Khas kura, Parbatiya and Gorkhali; the switch to Nepali was consolidated in the 1930s, when the body set up to publish and standardise it changed its name from one referring to Gorkha to one referring to Nepal.
What script is Nepali written in?
Devanagari, the same script as Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit. The Khas Malla inscriptions use earlier scripts of the same Nagari family, and standardised spelling came much later, largely through presses in Banaras and Darjeeling.
What are the oldest written records of Nepali?
Stone inscriptions from western Nepal, above all at Dullu in Dailekh district, conventionally assigned to the eleventh century although the readings and dates are debated. The Sinja valley carries inscribed stones from the Khas Malla court of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
How many people speak Nepali?
Around 44 per cent of Nepal's population reported it as a mother tongue at the 2021 census, and a much larger share speaks it as a second language. It is also an official language of Sikkim and a scheduled language of India.
Is the Nepali spoken in Karnali different?
Yes. The western varieties retain verb forms, vocabulary and pronunciations that the standard language has lost, so they are older rather than incorrect. Visitors using textbook Nepali should expect the far west to be harder to follow than Kathmandu or Pokhara.