Nepali

Nepali is the principal Eastern Pahari language of the Northern Indo-Aryan zone, originally the speech of the Khas people and known in its early form as Khas Kura. It grew from the Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars of the western Himalayas.

Its home was the Sinja valley, heartland of the Khasa Kingdom that flourished between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. The earliest known Nepali inscription, at Dullu in Dailekh, dates to about 981. After the Khasa realm broke up it was carried eastward by Khas migrants into the Gandaki basin.

Its rise began in the sixteenth century under the Kingdom of Gorkha. When Prithvi Narayan Shah unified the hill states into the Kingdom of Nepal in the later eighteenth century, Gorkha speech, as Nepali was then called, became the language of court and administration. It is written in the Devanagari script.