Regional Analysis

Santali is spoken across a wide belt of eastern India (Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam) and in parts of Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Script, register, and religious vocabulary expectations vary meaningfully across this range, more so than in most other languages in this pipeline.

Regional variation relevant to translation

• Jharkhand core: the state with the largest concentration of Santali speakers and the strongest institutional push for Ol Chiki-medium education; existing Sarna dharma revival institutions and jaher worship sites are especially visible here.
• West Bengal and Odisha: significant Santali-speaking populations where Bengali or Odia script has historically been more dominant for Santali publication than Ol Chiki, including much of the 19th-century Norwegian Santal Mission’s translation legacy.
• Bangladesh, Nepal, and diaspora communities: Santali speakers here may have even less exposure to Ol Chiki-medium materials and a correspondingly greater reliance on Bengali, Devanagari, or Roman script Christian literature.
• Script transition in progress: because Ol Chiki’s official recognition and school adoption is recent and uneven, literacy in any single script cannot be assumed uniformly across the whole speaker population; a single-script edition of this curriculum will not reach every intended reader equally.

Implications

Regional and script consistency is a more open question for Santali than for any other language in this batch. This curriculum’s use of Ol Chiki reflects the officially distinctive, most identity-affirming script choice, but publishers deploying this Language Package should plan for Bengali, Devanagari, or Roman script parallel editions depending on the target region, rather than assuming Ol Chiki alone will reach the full intended audience.