The Lamani language belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages. It originated in Rajasthan and in the opinion of the author, descended from Old Western Rajasthani along with Gujarati and Marwadi. The people claim descendancy from the Rajputs. They are known by several names such as: Banjari, Wanjari, Labhani, Lambani, Lambadi, Sukali and Singadi. The people prefer to call themselves Gormati or Gorwat.

At the present time the people, being nomadic, are scattered throughout Central India with heaviest population concentrations in Maharashtra, Mysore, and Andhra Pradesh. According to the '61 Census, Lamani is now spoken by over one million people. 

The dialect here described is spoken in the Gulbarga District of northern Mysore State--the area from which the Lamanis living next to Deccan College, Poona, have migrated. However, samples of text of the dialects spoken in Andhra near Hyderabad and in the Guntur District of Andhra have also been included in the analysis. The Lamani language, although varying somewhat in vocabulary and phonemic inventory from area to area, has virtually the same syntactic structure throughout. There is one exception to this viz., the Mathuri Banjari, spoken in Yeotmal District of Maharashtra, which is said to be a separate dialect.

Not much work has been done previously on Lamani. Only two works have come to my notice. One is in Sir George Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. In it he gives some very brief grammatical notes, some text and comments on its origin. The other is an article entitled, "Lambani Jana Mattu Avara Bhase", by M. Chidananda Murty in the journal Prabuddhakarnataka. It is written in Kannada and is largely ethnological in character with comments on the vocabulary, but little detailed grammatical analysis.

In the course of this thesis I have had several informants. Naik Desu Chandu Chawan, Motilal Kissan Chawan and Hiralal Topaji Chawan were the main three. Naik Desu Chandu Chawan, however, is the one who gave me my start in Lamani, and the one to whom I still go for checking. He is the chief of one of the two Lamani villages next to Deccan College. Because of a bad fall several years ago which left him partially paralyzed, he is unable to do manual work. His age is about 60 years.