Santali is spoken by about 8 million people. India's 2011 census, plus Bangladesh and Nepal. Written in Ol Chiki, a script devised for it in the 1920s.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Marwari, Sindhi and Punjabi (Shahmukhi). If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, objects come before their verbs, where English puts them after.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Santali sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,363 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 1,374 hours of study. Read how it works.
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded. The difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.