Halbi (also Bastari, Halba, Halvas, Halabi, Halvi, Mahari, Mehari) is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, transitional between Oriya and Marathi. It is spoken by 500,000 people across the central part of India. It uses SOV word order (subject-object-verb), makes strong use of affixes, and places adjectives before nouns. It is often used as a trade language, but there is a low literacy rate. Halbi is written in the Oriya & Devanagari script.