Santhals speak Santhali, which belongs to the Austro- Asiatic language family. Santhals have their script called Olchiki, which was developed by Dr Raghunath Murmu in 1925. They are generally bilingual. Apart from Santhali they also speak Bengali, Oriya and Hindi. The members of the Santhal tribe have accepted the dialect Santhali as their mother-tongue. This language has also been derived from the Austro-Asiatic group of languages and has a lot of features common with the languages like Vietnamese and Khmer like most of the lingos used by the tribes. The alphabet used by the Santhali language is known as Ol Chiki. A strange feature of this alphabet is that it does not possess any similitude with the Indic or the Devanagiri scripts. Another specititley of the Santhali language is that they possess three extra vowels along with six regular ones.
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