hi5 - Groups - Newa (The Newar’s)

Newa (The Newar’s)

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Category:	Cultures and Community
Created:	Jun 2, 2007
Type:	Public
Members:	203
Owner:	Jhamka Das SHRESTHA
Language:	English
Country:

The Newar or Newah are the indigenous people of Nepal's Kathmandu Valley. Newars are a linguistic community with multiple ethnicity/race and faith, bound together by a common language. The term Newar applies roughly to the people who inhabited Kathmandu valley and its peripheries before the unification of Nepal and speaking Nepal Bhasa ("Newari" according to Statistics Nepal) or the languages progenitor of Nepal Bhasa. According to Nepal’s 2001 census, the 1,245,232 Newar in the country are the nation's sixth largest ethnic group, representing 5.48% of the population. Newari is of Tibeto-Burman origin (but heavily influenced by Indoaryan languages like Sanskrit, Pali, Bengali and Maithili). Newari also contains Austro-Asiatic words and phrases. In 2001 the language is spoken by 825,458 Nepalese as their mother tongue
Newar practice both Buddhism and Hinduism. It is believed that the Newar were originally Buddhists but the long historical process of Sanskritization (adoption of Hindu rituals), led to the development of the Newar’s unique syncretic tradition. According to the 2001 Nepal Census, 84.13% of Newars were Hindus and 15.31% were Buddhists.
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