Bhili

Bhili is a Western Indo-Aryan language of the Bhil group, closely related to Gujarati and Rajasthani and spoken across the hills and forests of west-central India. Its roots lie in the Old Gujarati continuum that served as a literary language from the twelfth century and had taken a fairly standardised written shape by about 1300.

The Bhils' name may come from a Dravidian word for the bow that was their characteristic weapon; their older aboriginal speech was replaced by this Indo-Aryan tongue.

Bhili exists mainly as an oral language and splits into as many as three dozen local varieties, shading into Rajasthani in the north-west and Marathi in the south-east. It is written in the Devanagari script, and many Bhils also use the dominant language of the region around them.