Oriya

Oriya, or Odia, is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken on the Bay of Bengal coast in Odisha, descended from the Magadhi Prakrit through the Odra Prakrit.

Its earliest records are ninth-century inscriptions mixing Odra Prakrit with Sanskrit, and the first full Old Oriya inscription, the Urajam record of the Eastern Ganga kings, is dated 1051. Its curved Odia script developed for writing on palm leaves.

Old Oriya gave way to Middle Oriya from the fourteenth century, the age of the temple chronicles of Puri and of Sarala Das, who retold the Mahabharata in the vernacular; the five poets called the Panchasakha followed with devotional works such as the Odia Bhagabata. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries court poets had carried the literary language toward its modern form, while the related Halbi variety served traders farther inland.