Abstract
(Dardistan is the Hindu Kush Karakoram area which is at the crossroad of South and Central Asia. The region is one of the most polyglot areas in the world. The area has more than 50 languages with its greater part now is northern Pakistan.Most of these languages are still in the speech form, having no writing tradition in them. A majority of them face daunting challenges with the emergence of globalization and modernization.
If these languages are left to slowly perish, the communities who use them as their native languages for social interaction, understanding and communicating are sure to lose their indigenous knowledge, history and identity. This will, in turn, expose them to multiple vulnerabilities, such as a loss of self-esteem, crises of identity, wellbeing and belonging, and the loss of their unique creativity that is so intrinsically embedded in their languages. This article traces some of this linguistic diversity with a brief historical note on the history of Dardistan. – Author)
Dardistan (1) is one of the most diverse linguistic regions in the world. The veteran Norwegian linguist George Morgenstierne (1892—1978) called it one of the most polyglot parts of Asia1 . Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo informs us that Peristan(2) was an “enormous diversity of tongues and cultures”2.
The region has the large Dardic languages such as Kashmiri, Shina and Khowar, on the one hand, while, on the other, it is home to the Burushaski language which could not be placed within any language family because of its unique features. Here the Nuristani, formerly Kafiri, languages are also spoken. There are minor languages such as Kalasha, spoken by the Kalash community of hardly 4000 people who still follow the ancient animistic religion which was once practice throughout Dardistan.
The name Dardistan describes the area comprising the highest mountain ranges of Hindu Kush, Karakoram, western Himalaya and the Pamir mountains, compromising northern Pakistan, parts of Eastern Tibet in China, eastern Afghanistan and the Kashmir valley on both sides of the Pakistan India border (3). Dardistan’s enormous linguistic diversity occurs despite the fact that culturally the area is fairly homogenous3. An Italian anthropologist said that there is no match of this region in the linguistic and cultural diversity except the Caucasus4. Though of course minor differences exist, the same religious rituals and religious pantheon prevailed among the polyglot peoples of Dardistan.
Though the many languages spoken here mostly belong to the IndoEuropean family and, particularly to the sub-family Dardic within the Indo-Aryan, yet they differ from each other to such an extent that the people of one linguistic community have to rely on a third language, Pashto or Urdu, to communicate with the member of other communities. For instance, the people belonging to the Torwali and Gawri communities of the upper Swat valley need Pashto to converse with each other. This is despite the fact that the Torwali and Gawri languages are ‘sister languages’ and seem to have evolved from one single language a few centuries ago when Swat was taken over by the Yousafzai Pathans in the 16th century5 (4).
In 1986, the Summer Institute of Linguistics in collaboration with the National Institute of Folk Heritage, Lok Virsa, and The National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS), at the Quad-e-Azam University, Islamabad, undertook a sociolinguistic survey on the languages of northern Pakistan. This was published in five volumes in 1992 (5). The survey titled, “Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan6”,
documented 25 languages of Northern Pakistan, including Pashto, Hindko, Ormuri and Waneci. In fact, there are at least 34 languages in North Pakistan: Badehsi, Bateri, Balti, Brokskat, Burushaski, Chilliso, Dameli, Domaki, Gawarbati, Gawri, Gawro, Gujari, Hindko, Kalasha, Kalkoti, Kamviri, Kashmiri, Kativiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Kundol Shahi, Kyrgyz, Madakhlashti, Mankiyali, Pahari, Palula, Pashto, Sarikoli, Shina, Torwali, Ushojo, Yadgha and Wakhi.
Dardistan as a ‘linguistic’ area?
In 1956, the linguist M. B. Emeneau, in a paper titled ‘India as a Linguistic Area’, described it as a ‘linguistic area(6)’. The phrase ‘linguistic area’ is a technical term which means an area which includes languages of more than one family sharing some common traits with one another but not all the linguistic features are alike among thelanguage families7. Henrik Liljegren defines ‘linguistic area’ as “a geographical area with well-defined and neat boundaries within which all or most of the languages, regardless of phylogenetic identity, share a significant number of unique features that have arisen as the result of contact”8. The Swedish linguist, Henrik Liljegren has been conducting research on the languages of the area for the last two decades. In his new comparative study, “The Hindu Kush—Karakorum(7) and linguistic a reality’ published in 2021, he argues that it is not a ‘linguistic area’, in its conventional meaning He maintains that Dardistan is a ‘linguistic area’ if by that it is meant a “convergence zone with a core that shares certain linguistic features” because of long time contact with other subareas where languages do not share all the features yet display some other “micro-level convergence”9.
Morgenstierne was correct to claim the region is among the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. Presently about 50 languages are spoken in the area10. Despite the Islamisation ongoing since the sixteenth century11, the region has maintained this linguistic diversity which is, however, under grave threat. Dardistan is at the crossroads of South Asia and Central Asia. It is mountainous and makes for very hard traveling. Its mountain valleys remained isolated, beyond the reach of the invaders during the Islamisation, political domestication by Asian nation-states or colonisation by Europe. It is perhaps Dardistan’s mountainous geography that we still find the rich array of different languages belonging to different linguistic phyla here.
Dardistan is home to six language groups: namely Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani (All Indo-European), Turkic, Sino-Tibetan and Burushaski. Indo-Aryan phylum is the largest, including about 30 languages, which have also been lumped together as ‘Dardic’ (NorthWestern Indo-Aryan) by linguists and chroniclers including John Biddulph12 (8), George Grierson13 (9) and George14 Morgenstierne (10). The second largest group is of Iranian languages. They are spread over territories of several countries: Afghanistan, China, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. More than 30 of the 50 languages spoken in the parts of Dardistan that include Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, come from this group.
My work as an ethnographer and linguist has focused on North Pakistan, which includes all languages of all the five phyla and the Burushaski.
North Pakistan is a spectacular mountainous land of immense linguistic, ethnic and geographic diversity. It is undoubtedly one of the most multilingual places on the planet. People movements and contact across this crossroad of Central and South Asia over many centuries have left a complex pattern of languages and dialects (11). By ‘North Pakistan’ I mean the region of Gilgit-Baltistan, the upper parts of Pakistan’s northwest province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the districts of Chitral, Dir, Swat, Buner, Shangla, the upper Hazara division, and the part of Kashmir Vale under Pakistan’s control. In terms of land and population, North Pakistan is larger than Austria and Switzerland combined. (12).
According to Ethnologue, an informative compendium of the languages of world, Pakistan has 77 languages spoken within its territory15. Past attempts of profiling the languages of what is now Pakistan have been done by foreign researchers, either associated with the colonial British government or with international organizations. Before Grierson, in the 19th century, Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (13), did some linguistic and anthropological work on the languages and people of these areas. In 1877 he published The Languages and Races of Dardistan16. John Biddulph, an officer in the British army, also did monumental work on the languages and peoples of these areas in his 1880’s Tribes of Hindoo Koosh17. Sir George Abraham Grierson, an Irish linguist and language scholar who had also served in the Indian Civil Services, published a Linguistic Survey of India—a seminal work of nineteen volumes after research on 364 languages for over thirty years, from 1903 to 192818. Grierson too was interested in the languages spoken in this mountainous region of North Pakistan. Over the past century, the languages of Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan have continued to attract attention from anthropologists and linguists, including Georg Morgenstierne, Karl Jettmar19 (14), Frederik Barth 20 (15) and many others.
No government or university within Pakistan has ever taken any initiative of profiling the languages spoken by its people. Only a few of them—Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Sindhi and Saraiki—are mentioned in media, teaching materials and in any kind of national database. It is difficult to count the exact number of speakers of each language because none of these languages have been counted in the six national censuses conducted so far in Pakistan. The number of speakers of these languages may vary from few hundreds to millions (16). Many are also spoken in Pakistan’s neighbouring countries, i.e., Afghanistan, India, and China.
All these languages are categorized as ‘endangered’ in the Routledge’s Encyclopedia of World’s Endangered Languages (2008)21 edited by Christopher Moseley. Many of them are ‘severely endangered’ whereas a few are ‘moribund’ or already ‘extinct’.
Brief notes on five of these languages of North Pakistan
Description of all the 35 languages spoken in North Pakistan is not possible given space constraints. Brief description of one unique and four other languages is provided below:
Burushaski: It is the single ‘language isolate’ (17) in Pakistan as it has not been classified under any of the major or subgroups of languages (18). It is not related to its neighbouring languages, the Dardic or Iranian. One of the striking theories puts Burushaski in the category of the Caucasian languages and with Basque22. It is spoken in the districts of Hunza, Nagar and in the Yasin valley in the Ghizer district of Gilgit Baltistan in Pakistan and by a small population in Srinagar in Kashmir. The Yasin variety of Busurshaski is sometimes called Werchikwar, probably by the local Khowar speakers while in Nagar the variety of Burushaski is also known as Khanjuna. Burushaski is said to be the oldest language of the area, dated before the immigration of the Aryans in India. The people who speak it are known as Burusho. A considerable number of Burusho people live in Karachi as well.
Wakhi: It is an Iranian language. In Pakistan it is mainly spoken in Gojal, and Hunza in the Gilgit Baltistan region. However, a small number of Wakhi speaking people also live in Yasin valley in the Ghizer district of Gilgt Baltistan. It is also spoken by a small population in the Yarkhun valley of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The name Wakhi is derived from Wakhan, the narrow corridor of Afghanistan’s province of Badakhshan which separates Pakistan from Tajikistan. The Wakhan area is said to be the original homeland of the Wakhi people and their language. The Wakhis in North Pakistan migrated to their present locations from the Wakhan region during the 18th and early 19th centuries23. In addition to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Wakhi speakers are also found in the adjacent parts of Tajikistan, and in the nearby Sarikol area of China.
Kalasha: Many people in Pakistan, and abroad, are familiar with the unique Kalash people living in three valleys in Chitral. Kalasha, which is Dardic, is the language of these people. The Kalash country is called Kakashadesh while the language is known as Kalasha or Kalashamon. The Kalash people are concentrated in several small valleys on the west side of the Chitral River, south of Chitral town: Rumbur, Bumboret, Birir and Urstun Valleys of district Chitral in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The present Kalasha religion is the last vestige of the ancient belief system people practiced throughout Dardistan24. The nearby Nuristan province in Afghanistan had similar religious beliefs till their forced conversion to Islam by 1893. The people of Kalash, when converting to Islam, not only cease to practice their religion but also abandon their language. Some past studies suggested a Greek descent of the Kalash people and maintained they were the remnants of the army of Alexander the Great. Later anthropological genetic studies dismissed such claims and found the Kalash as one of the old Dardic communities that still retain animistic religious practices, once common throughout Dardistan, irrespective of linguistic and ethnic denominators25. The present estimate of all Kalasha speaking population is said to be hardly 4000.
Khowar: Khowar is a major Dardic language and is the primary language spoken in Chitral. It is also spoken in certain villages and valleys in the Ghizer district of Gilgit Baltistan. It is perhaps the single Dardic language in Pakistan that received some sort of state patronage when Chitral was a princely state. Khowar has, interestingly, no subdialect and mostly remains the same within Chitral and Ghizer. Morgenstierne relates the homogeneity of the language to the continuous transfer of peasants by the ruling family from one part to another in Chitral, while Gerard Fussman regards the raising of the sons of the noble Kho families by others than their own as the reason26. Khowar is greatly influenced by Iranian, perhaps due the past rulers and immigrants from Central Asia. Morgenstierne states that although Khowar has been strongly influenced by the Iranian languages to the west, its general structure, however, is purely Indo-Aryan27. Khowar is perhaps the single Dardic language which was studied by South Asians, Europeans and local scholars.28
Shina: It is the major language of Gilgit Baltistan. Among all the Dardic languages there is considerable research literature found on the Shina language and its speakers29. It is spoken in Gilgit city, Puniyal, in villages of Ghizer district, in Shinaki area connected to Hunza, and in the Astor and Diamer districts of Gilgit Baltitsan. It is also spoken in the Eastern Kohistan region, on eastern side of the River Indus, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Shina is a Dardic language with a wide range
of dialects and distinctly affiliated languages such as Palula, Kalkoti, Ushojo, Brokskat which have, over time and due to isolation, developed into distinct languages. The Shina speakers are among the Dards who had many legends, myths and used to practice shamanism with the help of specialized men called Danyal. Some forms of shamanism still exist in certain areas of Shinaki people.
Torwali: This Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family is spoken in the Bahrain and Chail areas of District Swat in Northern Pakistan. According to some estimates based on surveys in 2016 the Torwali population is over 120,00030, while recent research, based on an analysis of the Pakistan National Census of 2017, counts the number of speakers of the Torwali language to be approximately 130,00031. Possibly 40 percent of them have permanently migrated and settled in the larger cities of Pakistan. Torwali has a rich tradition of oral literature in the form of traditional songs, folktales and poetry. About 70 percent of the poets of these traditional songs used to be women, as indicated by the poetic tradition of the unknown ʐo couplets of the past 80 to 100 years. Another poteic genre ‘phal’ was also very common in Torwali. Torwali poetry, once again, is thriving because of many young poets and singers, but the participation of women is limited, unlike the past.
Some of these folk songs can be sampled online. Folk songs of four of these languages can be found through the following links:
• Shina song: Mai Hiyo Aldaha (19)
https://soundcloud.com/zubairtorwali/shina-song-byghafoor-chilasi-mai-hiyo-aldahaq-hann
• Torwali songs: ᶎo couplets
https://soundcloud.com/zubairtorwali/torwali-songs-byabdul-haleem-noorani
• Burushaski song: Jee Ye Sar Dawa Saba
https://youtu.be/ECQg9q3Rlpc
• Khowar song: Ashoor Jan (My Soulmate) (20)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/QYNG81E__B0
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user939093219/ashoor-jaan
Most of these languages are still in the speech form, having no writing tradition in them. A majority of them face daunting challenges
with the emergence of globalization and modernization. With the erosion of these indigenous languages, knowledge and unique forms of beauty and wisdom will be lost.
On the other hand, if these languages are left to slowly perish, the communities who use them as their native languages for social interaction, understanding and communicating are sure to lose their indigenous knowledge, history and identity. This will, in turn, expose them to multiple vulnerabilities, such as a loss of self-esteem, crises of identity, wellbeing and belonging, and the loss of their unique creativity that is so intrinsically embedded in their languages.
Notes:
1. The name, Dardistan, to this geo-cultural territory was first applied by the well-known orientalist and the then principal of the Government College in Lahore, Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner in his book ‘Languages and Races of Dardistan’ written in 1866. Leitner wrote on page 8, “Thirdly, by adoption of my term ‘Dardistan’, for the countries between Kabul, Kashmir, and Badakhshan, we were led to compare a number of races, which offer certain analogies, and which may have had a certain history in common since the time of the Alexander the Great’s invasion of India”. Probably Leitner borrowed the term Dardistan داردستان from ancient writers who wrote in Persian. For example the one such historian, Mirza Sang Muhammad Badakhshi used it in his Persian book “Tarikh-i- Badakhshan بدخشان اترخی written in the 9th century.
2. Alberto M. Cacopardo and Augusto S. Cacopardo suggest Persitan, land of fairies, for the area of Dardistan in their work “Gates of Peristan: history, religion and society in the Hindu Kush” but their Peristan seem much smaller than Dardistan.
3. To this area the name Peristan was given by Alberto and Augusto Cacaopardo which is described by Ugo Fabietti as ‘the large area stretching from north-western Afghanistan across Northern Pakistan to India and China’ in his preface to Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo book, ‘Gates of Peristan: History, Religion and Society in the Hindu Kush’ published in Rome in 2001.
4. Inam ur Rahim and Mario Alain Viaro writes in their book ‘Swat: An Afghan Society in Pakistan’ on page 71, “ It is the colonisation of the region by the nomadic Yusafzais, better warriors than herdsmen, in the sixteenth century, which marks the end of this period, and the real beginning of the Mustim period in the area. It also marks the end of urban civilisations in the valley, phenomenon that was to increase by the Wesh system. The Yousafzai colonisation marks also the deletion· the obliteration of the past history and flourishing of the idea that nothing existed before them. It only the Western scholars, like A. Foucher (1901), Sir Aurel Stein (1929), and the Italian archaeologists (1956) who were to rediscover the pre-Muslim past. During Swati rule Dard people were most probably non-believers and dominantly Hindu, frequent small-scale Jihad against Dard mighr have a routine and
probably continued even some rime after Yousafzai occupation, The Madyan and Bisham territories have been described to be taken through Jihad and are stiil owned by the descendants (Miangan) of that time Jihadi leader.”
5. O’Leary F. Clare; series editor (1992). “Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan. The series contains five volumes namely:
I. Languages of Kohistan as vol. 1
II. Languages of Northern Areas as vol. 2
III. Hindko and Gujari as vol. 3
IV. Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri as vol. 4
V. Languages of Chitral as vol. 5
6. M. B. Emeneau defines linguistic area as, “This term ‘linguistic area’ may be defined as meaning an area which includes languages
belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common which are found not to belong to the other members of (at least)
one of the families”.
7. Henrik Liljegren uses term such as Hindu Kush-Karakoram (HHK) area for the area we call Dardistan in this paper.
8. John Biddulph states in his book “Tribes of Hindoo Koosh”, ‘As, however, there is no one name which will properly apply to the peoples and countries in question, it will be perhaps convenient to retain the names of Dard and Dardistan when
speaking collectively of the tribes in question and the countries they inhabit.’
9. George Grierson says in his “Note on Tirahi Language”, “In this way, Tirahi forms an important link connecting the Dardic languages spoken in Dardistiin, north of the Kabul, with a chain of three languages which show traces of ancient Dardic influence, and reach down to the mouth of the Indus.”
10. “The dominant ethnic element in these valleys are speakers of the Kafir and Dardic languages, belonging to the Indo-Iranian stock and sharing such religious traditions as we know them from the Avestan and Vedic texts.” Morgenstierne in “Languages of Nuristan and Surrounding Regions” paper published in ‘Cultures of Hindu Kush: selected papers from the Hindu Kush Cultural Conference’ held at Moesgard in 1970.
11. Clare, F. O’Leary (1992). “Introduction” to ‘Languages of Northern Areas’ which if volume 2 of the “Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” published jointly by The National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS) of Quad-i-Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)’s Eurasia office, UK.
12. Alberto Cacopardo states about the former Kafiristan, our Dardistan, land is twice as big as Switzerland in his 2016 paper “Fence of Peristan – The Islamization of the “Kafirs” and Their Domestication, Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologia – Vol. CXLVI
13. Leitner undertook travel to the areas in 1866.
14. Karl Jettmar extensively wrote on the ethnography and anthropology of Dardistan in the German language as well as in English. For instance, Religions of Hindu Kush, Ethnographic Research in Dardistan
15. For instance, Barth’s work on the Swat Pathans, Ecologic Relationships of Ethnic Groups in Swat, North Pakistan, Indus and Swat Kohsitan: an ethnographic survey
16. For example, the Mankiyali language has hardly few hundred speakers whereas Shina has around 1 million.
17. “Alanguage isolate, in the absolute sense, is anatural languagewith no demonstrable genealogical (or «genetic») relationship with other languages, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language”. https://linguifex.com/wiki/Language_isolate
18. German linguist Hermann Berger quotes P.W. Schmidt and says that in his great work on the languages of the world (1926)
Schmidt remarks: “This isolated position of Burushaski is a principal of great importance, for it gives the defmite proof that before or besides the Dravidian and Munda languages in India, other languages were in existence. One of them could be saved upto our days near the great Northwestern highway to India, protected, to be sure, by inaccessible valleys, ‘at a place (here he quotes Grierson) where Turki, Tibeto-Burmese, Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages all meet” Berger, Hermann (1985). “A survey of Burushaski Studies” Journal of Central Asi, vol. XIII, no. 1
19. Translation of this Shina poem by Aziz Ali Dad helped this author to render it another way and same is true for the Burushaski song’s translation.
20. The song was translated first by Zahoor Ali Danish. I tried to render it in a more poetic form.
References:
1 Morgenstierne, G. (1932). Report on a Linguistic Mission to North Western India. Oslo
2 Cacopardo, M. Alberto (2016). Fence of Peristan – The Islamization of the “Kafirs” and Their Domestication, Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologia – Vol. CXLVI
3 Cacopardo, Alberto and Augusto (2001). “Gates of Peristan: History, Religion and Society in the Hindu Kush” page 16
4 Fabietti, Ugo (2001). ‘Preface” to the chapter ‘Gates of Peristan: History, Religion and Society in the Hindu Kush’ by Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo published in “Reports and Memoirs” volume 5, published by IsIAO Rome, Italy
5 Inam-ur-Rahim, Viaro, M. Alain (2002), “Swat: An Afghan Society in Pakistan: Urbanization and Change in a Tribal Environment”. City Press, Karachi Pakistan
6 O’Leary F. Clare, series editor (1992). “Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” published by The National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quad-i. Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics, West Eurasia Office, Horsleys Green, High Wycombe, BUCKS HP14 3XL United Kingdom.
7 Emeneau, M. B. (1956). India as a Linguistic Area. Language vol. 32, issue 1, pages 3-16. Published by Linguistic Society of America. URL: http://www.jstor. org/stable/410649
8 Liljegren, H. (2021, April). The Hindu Kush–Karakorum and linguistic. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 7(2). doi:10.1515/jsall-2021-2027
9 Ibid
10 Ibid
11 Cacopardo, M. Alberto (2016). Fence of Peristan – The Islamization of the “Kafirs” and Their Domestication, Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologia -Vol. CXLVI. Page 69
12 John Biddulph (1880). “Tribes of Hindoo Koosh” Urn ein Vorwort vermehrter Nachdruck der 1880 irn Office of the Superintendant of Government Printing in Calcutta erschienenen Ausgabe Photomechanischer Nachdruck @ Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz ,971 Printed in Austria
13 Grierson, George (1925). “Notes on Tirahi Language” publisher Journal of of Royal Asiatic Society
14 Morgenstierne, Georg (1974). «Languages of Nuristan and Surrounding Regions». In: Jettmar, Karl; Edelberg, Lennart (eds.), Cultures of the Hindu Kush = Selected Papers from the Hindu-Kush Cultural Conference Held at Moesgård 1970. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, pp. 110.
15 Ethnologue. https://www.ethnologue.com/country/PK (accessed on April 28, 2022)
16 Leitner, G. W. (1877). “The Languages and Races of Dardistan” published by Government of Central Book Depot, Lahore.
17 John Biddulph (1880). “Tribes of Hindoo Koosh” Urn ein Vorwort vermehrter Nachdruck der 1880 irn Office of the Superintendant of Government Printing in Calcutta erschienenen Ausgabe Photomechanischer Nachdruck @ Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz ,971 Printed in Austria
18 Linguistic survey of India / [compiled and edited] by George Abraham Grierson. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903- 1928. Link: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/lsi/
19 Jattmar, K. (1961). Ethnological Research in Dardistan 1958 preliminary report. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (p. 83). American Philosophical Society
20 Barth, Fredrik (1956). “Indus and Swat Kohistan: an Ethnographic Survey”. Oslo
21 Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2008). Encyclopedia of World’s Endangered Languages. Routledge
22 Weinreich, Matthias (2015). “Not only in the Caucasus: Ethno-linguistic Diversity on the Roof of the World” Koninklijke Brill NV, , 2015
23 Ibid
24 Cacopardo, M. Alberto (2016). Fence of Peristan – The Islamization of the “Kafirs” and Their Domestication, Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologia – Vol. CXLVI
25 Cacopardo, S. Augusto (2011). “Are the Kalasha really of Greek origin? The Legend of Alexander the Great and the Pre-Islamic World of the Hindu Kush” in Acta Orientalia 2011: 72, 47–92. Printed in India
26 Decker, D. Kendall (1992). “Khowar” in “Languages of Chitral”, the volume 5 of ‘Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” published by National Institute for Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quad-i-Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics, Eurasia Office, UK.
27 Decker, D. Kendall (1992). “Khowar” in “Languages of Chitral”, the volume 5 of ‘Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” published by National Institute for Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quad-i-Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics, Eurasia Office, UK.
28 Decker, D. Kendall (1992). “Khowar” in “Languages of Chitral”, the volume 5 of ‘Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” published by National Institute for Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quad-i-Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics, Eurasia Office, UK.
29 Radloff , F. Carla (1992). “The Dialects of Shina” in ‘Languages of Northern Areas’ which volume 2 of the ‘Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan” edited by Clare, D. O’Leary and published by National Institute for Pakistan
Studies (NIPS), Quad-i-Azam University, Islamabad and Summer Institute of Linguistics, Eurasia Office, UK.
30 Syed A. Manan, Liaqat Ali Channa, Khadija Tul-Kubra and Maya Khemlani David, “Ecological planning towards language revitalization: The Torwali minority language in Pakistan”, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 31, Issue 3 (New Jersey, USA; John Wiley & Sons, Wiley, 2021) page 6
31 Wayne A. Lunsford, Muhammad Zaman Sagar, Ejaz Ahmad and Amir Haider, Measuring the Impact of using “The Guide” in Six Speech Communities of Northern Pakistan, in Planning Language Use Case Studies in CommunityBased Language Development, ed. David M. Eberhard and Scott A. Smith (SIL International 2021), page 78.
