Santali (ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ, সাঁওতালি, ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ, सान्ताली, Pronounced: [santaɽi]) is a Munda language spoken natively by the Santal people of South Asia.

[6] It is spoken by around 7.6 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer.

[5] Santali was a mainly oral language until developments were made by European missionaries to write it in Bengali, Odia and Roman scripts.

Ol Chiki is alphabetic, sharing none of the syllabic properties of the other Indic scripts, and is now widely used to write Santali in India.

Bengali, Odia and Roman scripts were first used to write Santali before the 1860s by European anthropologists, folklorists and missionaries including A. R. Campbell, Lars Skrefsrud and Paul Bodding.

Their efforts resulted in Santali dictionaries, versions of folk tales, and the study of the morphology, syntax and phonetic structure of the language.

The Ol Chiki script was created for Santali by Mayurbhanj poet Raghunath Murmu in 1925 and first publicised in 1939.

Presently in West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkhand, Ol Chiki is the official script for Santali literature & language.

Outside India, the language is spoken in pockets of Rangpur and Rajshahi divisions of northern Bangladesh as well as the Morang and Jhapa districts in the Terai of Koshi Province in Nepal.

[5][20][21] Santali has 21 consonants, not counting the 10 aspirated stops which occur primarily, but not exclusively, in Indo-Aryan loanwords and are given in parentheses in the table below.

[31] The indefinite pronouns are:[32] The demonstratives distinguish three degrees of deixis (proximate, distal, remote) and simple ('this', 'that', etc.)

ᱯᱮpe(3‍  ×ᱜᱮᱞgel10‍)              ororor              (ᱢᱤᱫ)(mit’)((1‍)  ×ᱤᱥᱤisi20‍  +ᱜᱮᱞgel10‍)ᱯᱮ {} ᱜᱮᱞ {            } or {            } (ᱢᱤᱫ) {} ᱤᱥᱤ {} ᱜᱮᱞpe {} gel {} or {} (mit’) {} isi {} gel(3‍ × 10‍) {} or {} ((1‍) × 20‍ + 10‍)30Verbs in Santali inflect for tense, aspect and mood, voice and the person and number of the subject and sometimes of the object.

To denote inalienable possession, prefix -t- is attached to the applicative forms of the pronouns; otherwise it is marked in the noun phrase and functions as an attribute.

ir-ke-t-ta-e-a=kocut-ASP-TR-POSS-3SG.OBJ-FIN=3PL.SUBJir-ke-t-ta-e-a=kocut-ASP-TR-POSS-3SG.OBJ-FIN=3PL.SUBJ'they have cut his (paddy)'In daily conversations, Santali speakers generally employ high percentages of words of native Austroasiatic/Munda/Santali origins, compared to other Munda languages such as Kharia and Juang.

Loan words, mostly borrowed from Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Nepali, Oriya and even English may account for almost 20% of the lexemes of daily needs.

Younger generation who have opportunities to engage in higher education tend to be more accustomed with lexical influence from neighboring languages as well as English.