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Khowar (, Khōwār, ), also known by its common exonym Chitrali, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic languages, primarily spoken by the Kho people (Chitralis), native to the Chitral District and surrounding areas of Pakistan.
Khowar is the lingua franca of Chitral, and it is also spoken in the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, as well as in the Upper Swat District.
Speakers of Khowar have also migrated heavily to Pakistan's major urban centres, with Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar having significant populations. It is also spoken as a second language by the Kalash people.M. Oranskij, “Indo-Iranica IV. Tadjik (Régional) Buruǰ ‘Bouleau,’” in Mélanges linguistiques offerts à Émile Benveniste, Paris, 1975, pp. 435–40.
Khowar shares a great number of morphological characteristics with neighbouring Iranian languages of Badakhshan, pointing to a very early location of proto-Khowar in its original abode in Upper Chitral, although from its links with the Gandhari language, it likely came from further south in the first millennium BC, possibly through Swat and Dir .
Georg Morgenstierne noted, "Khowar, in many respects is the most archaic of all modern Indian languages, retaining a great part of Sanskrit case inflexion, and retaining many words in a nearly Sanskritic form".
Khowar may also have nasalized vowels and a series of Vowel length , , , , and . Sources are inconsistent on whether length is phonemic, with one author stating "vowel-length is observed mainly as a substitute one. The vowel-length of phonological value is noted far more rarely." Unlike the neighboring and related Kalasha-mun, Khowar does not have retroflex vowels.
Allophones of are heard as sounds . /q x ɣ ʑ f/ are restricted to Perso-Arabic loanwords in most IA languages but they occur natively in Khowar, e.g. Sanskrit mukha, yūkā, yákan, bhrāturjāyā; Khowar mux, žuġ, ṣéġun, brežáyu. The original Old Indo-Aryan /s, ʂ, ɕ/ contrast is maintained, eg. OIA. joṣati, aśru, svásṛ; Kh. ǰoṣík, aśrú, ispusár. The OIA kṣ became c̣/c̣h eg. OIA. pakṣa, Kh. poc̣ and more sibilants were made instead of a reduction which Continental IA did, eg. OIA. gaḍa, Kh. goẓ. OIA cluster ts was either preserved as a single phoneme ċ/ċh or merged with some other consonant OIA. vatsa, matsya, uts Kh. bac̣hóɫ, maċhí, uċ.
From the end of the 19th century onwards, literaturists and rulers of Chitral princely state have put in much effort to popularize literacy, reading, and writing in Khowar. Initially, Mirza Muhammad Shakur and Prince Tajumal Shah Mohfi adopted Persian alphabet, used in neighbouring Afghanistan. However, Persian alphabet did not have letters for many unique sounds in Khowar. By the early 20th century, as under British Colonial rule, Urdu education and literacy became ever more popular among Indian Muslims (see Hindi–Urdu controversy),
Consonants
Tone
Khowar, like many Dardic languages, has either phonemic tone or stress distinctions.
Orthography
Khowar orthography is derived from Urdu alphabet, with additional letters created to represent sounds unique to Khowar. Similar to Urdu, Khowar is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script.
(2025). 9780415201124, Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780415201124 Chitrali literaturists, namely Sir Nasir ul-Mulk and Mirza Muhammad Ghafran saw Urdu script as a better fit for Khowar. Nonetheless, Urdu also lacked sounds that existed in Chitrali. Thus, new letters were proposed and created. But the process of settling on a standard Khowar script continued for decades into the 1970s. This process was not without controversy either. Some literaturists were advocating for keeping the number of letters to a minimum, or in other words removing Arabic letters that do not represent distinct sounds in Khowar and are homophone with other letters (for example , being homophone with respectively). In total, 6 new letters were added to the 37-letter Urdu Alphabet, to create the 43-letter Khowar script.Ahmadriza, Fareed. Hussain, Mumtaz. History of the Khowar Alphabet http://www.mahraka.com/khowar_alphabets.html
See also
Further reading
Notes
Additional references
Kendall D. Decker (1992). 9789698023157, National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics. ISBN 9789698023157
External links
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