Kanauji is spoken in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India in the districts of Kanauj, Kanpur, Farrukhabad, Hardoi, Auraiya, Etawah, Mainpuri, Shahjahanpur, and Pilibhit (see Figure 1). Kanauji’s territory extends approximately between latitudes 26.5 to 28.5 degrees north and longitudes 70 to 80.5 degrees east. The Kanauji-speaking population is estimated to be around 7,093,740 according to the 2001 census (John & Varghese 2021: 1).

The label Kanauji was coined by Grierson (1968[1916]) in the Linguistic Survey of India. Grierson categorizes the language as belonging to the Western Hindi group along with Bundeli, Braj Bhasha, and Hariyanvi, all varieties of Standard Hindi. According to Tripathi (1977: 22), Kanauji has multiple names referencing the Kanauj district in Uttar Pradesh where it is spoken: Kannauji, Kanauji, and Kanujiya. In the Farrukhabad district, it is called Kanujujiya. Kanauji has three sub-variants: Kanauji Proper, Tirhari, and Transitional Kanauji. The form that is considered “pure” and “proper” is spoken in Kanauj and Farukkhabad.

Most Kanauji speakers identify themselves as speaking Dehati ‘village variety’ (John & Varghese 2021: 11). According to John & Varghese, Kanauji speakers are bilingual in Hindi. Although Kanauji is common in many domains of daily life, a shift toward Standard Hindi is being observed, especially among young and educated speakers. Education has played a primary role in enhancing the Hindi proficiency of Kanauji speakers, improving their ability to speak and read complex materials such as books, newspapers, and magazines in Hindi.

Kumar (2009: 5) explains that in this area spoken Hindi is known as Khariboli, sometimes also called Hindustani. This language emerged as the primary language for communication and lingua franca in North India due to the interaction and blending of different Indian and foreign language speakers. Khariboli was not regarded as a suitable medium for official instructions in feudal courts or for standardized use in creative endeavors, but it began to operate as the oral vernacular for the common people and has become a language of broader communication in the north (Verma 1933).

Standard Hindi and Khariboli have shared a classic diglossic relationship since Indian independence. While Khariboli is used as a lingua franca across northern India, it is Standard Hindi that holds the status of the official and literary language.1 Kanauji speakers prefer the more prestigious Khariboli and Modern Standard Hindi in casual and formal situations, respectively. Since Khariboli is the lingua franca, using it helps Kanauji speakers blend in with urrban Hindi speakers and communicate effectively with speakers of other languages. Standard Hindi is perceived as a pathway to attaining economic gains and higher prestige.

Kanauji is restricted to close-knit settings like households and local communities and is dispreferred in public and formal contexts. The use of Kanauji in public is a marker of lower status, implying rural background, lower economic class, and lack of formal education. Educated youths feel ashamed to use Kanauji in the presence of non-Kanauji speakers, and educated youth often use Kanauji to look down upon or make fun of someone. (Dwivedi & Kar 2016: 110). This suggests they harbor a negative attitude toward their mother tongue. Despite this, when asked if they would if they would like to see Kanauji introduced into formal education settings, rural youth replied that they would (Pandey 2023a). There is evidence that university students use Khariboli in inter and intra-group communication, while they speak Kanauji with their older family members and grandparents.

Although the phonology and morphology of Kanauji and Hindi are quite similar, according to Dwivedi & Kar (2018: 206) Kanauji does have some phonological features that are distinct from Hindi. For instance, in Kanauji the palatal and velar nasal phones [ɲ] and [ŋ] are allophones of /n/ and thus do not have a phonemic status like they do in Hindi. Kanauji has processes of fortition, nasalization, vowel insertion, and reduplication when compared to Hindi; for example, Hindi skuːl ‘school’ corresponds to ɪskuːl ‘school’ in Kanauji; Hindi luʈ ‘theft’ is luʈ-laʈ in Kanauji. There are also differences in words ending with ɾ, l, and ɽ. An example is pipəl ‘peepal tree’ in Hindi, which is pronounced pipər ‘peepal tree’ in Kanauji.

Morphological similarities are observed between the Hindi and Kanauji lexicon. Question words are simultaneously inflected for number and gender, e.g., Hindi kɛsɑ and Kanauji kəɪsɑ ‘how.m.sg; Hindi kɪt̪nɑ and Kanauji kɪt̪t̪ɑ ‘how much/many.m.sg’. Full and discontinuous reduplication are observed in both languages’ question words; e.g., Hindi kəbhi-nɑ-kəbhi and Kanauji kəbhəʊ̃-nɑ-kəbhəʊ̃ ‘some time or the other’. Synchronic morphophonological variation in question words was observed between different regional varieties of Kanauji, suggesting a need for more extensive documentation (Pandey 2023b).

Many works briefly discuss the areal distribution and position of Kanauji with respect to Khariboli. These include Shapiro (1989), Masica (1993), and Kachru (2006), among others. There is work on Kanauji folk songs (Santram 1975) and on the sociology of Kanauji literature (Tripathi 1977). Pandey (1978) provides a basic description of the linguistic characteristics of Kanauji, including vowels and consonants, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and question words; Tripathi (1977) provides a comparative overview of the grammar of the varieties spoken in the lower Ganga plain region. Trivedi (1990) accounts for echo words in Kanauji. Recent work on the linguistic repertoire of Kanpur sheds light on Kanpur as the confluence of several varieties of Hindi (Chaturvedi 2015). Mishra & Bali (2010, 2011) have developed a small-scale NLP application in Kanauji.

Dwivedi & Kar (2016, 2017, 2018) describe the phonology and sociolinguistics of Kanauji of Kanpur. Singh (2016) provides a brief background, wordlist, and grammar of the Kanauji language variety. John & Varghese (2021) give a broad sociolinguistic profile of Kanauji speakers of Uttar Pradesh. Their study outlines the present geographical distribution of the Kanauji language and its relationship with other Western Hindi varieties such as Bundeli, Braj Bhasha, and Hindi. It also documents the level of bilingualism in Kanauji speakers, their attitudes toward the language, and the extent of the language shift toward Hindi.

The author’s work on Kanauji was begun during PhD studies (2017–2023) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The project endeavored to describe the structure and function of questions and question words in Kanauji and Standard Hindi. Kanauji data was collected primarily from Kanpur district, however, a brief overview of the morpho-phonological variation among different regional varieties of Kanauji was also provided. As the data was mostly collected during COVID-19, remote fieldwork using mobile interviews was adopted. Since most Kanauji speakers exhibit bilingual proficiency in Hindi, elicitation was done via questionnaires prepared in Hindi. Around twenty audio recordings of dialogues were also collected; these were used to create a podcast featuring rituals of the Kanauji language (Pandey 2024). A quantitative sociolinguistic survey with rural school children and college youth in Kanpur studied bilingualism, bidialectalism, and extended diglossia among Kanauji speakers who use Khariboli and Standard Hindi in the overlapping domains of education, media, religion, the household, work, and more. The project represents a step towards bringing recognition to this variety.