The Pamir languages are an areal features group of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by numerous people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pamir language family was sometimes referred to as the Ghalchah languages by western scholars.[In his 1892 work on the Avestan language Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson, The later Iranian languages, New Persian, Kurdish, Afghan, Ossetish, Baluchi, Ghalach and some minor modern dialects." ] The term Ghalchah is no longer used to refer to the Pamir languages or the native speakers of these languages.
Geographic distribution
The Pamirian languages are spoken primarily in the Badakhshan Province of northeastern
Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of eastern
Tajikistan.
Pamirian languages are also spoken in Xinjiang and the Pamir language Sarikoli is spoken beyond the Sarikol Range on the Afghanistan-China border and thus qualifies as the easternmost of the extant Iranian languages.
Wakhi communities are also found in the adjacent Chitral District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Gojal, Gilgit Baltistan in Pakistan.
The only other living member of the Southeastern Iranian group is Pashto language.
Classification
No features uniting the Pamir languages as a single subgroup of Iranian have been demonstrated.
[Antje Wendtland (2009), The position of the Pamir languages within East Iranian, Orientalia Suecana LVIII "The Pamir languages are a group of East Iranian languages which are linguistically quite diverse and
cannot be traced back to a common ancestor. The term Pamir languages is based on their geographical position rather than on their genetic closeness. Exclusive features by which the Pamir languages can be distinguished from all other East Iranian languages cannot be found either."] The
Ethnologue lists the Pamir languages along with Pashto as Southeastern Iranian,
[. SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World.] however, according to Encyclopedia Iranica, the Pamirian languages and Pashto belong to the North-Eastern Iranian branch.
[Nicholas Sims-Williams, Eastern Iranian languages, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, 2010. "The Modern Eastern Iranian languages are even more numerous and varied. Most of them are classified as North-Eastern: Ossetic; Yaghnobi (which derives from a dialect closely related to Sogdian); the Shughni group (Shughni, Roshani, Khufi, Bartangi, Roshorvi, Sarikoli), with which Yazghulyami (Sokolova 1967) and the now extinct Wanji (J. Payne in Schmitt, p. 420) are closely linked; Ishkashmi, Sanglichi, and Zebaki; Wakhi; Munji and Yidgha; and Pashto."]
Members of the Pamirian language area include four reliable groups: a Shughni-Yazghulam group including Shughni language, Sarikoli, and Yazghulami; Munji language and Yidgha language; Ishkashimi and related dialects; and Wakhi language. They have the subject-object-verb syntactic typology.
Václav Blažek (2019) suggests that the Pamir languages have a Burushaski-like substratum. Although Burushaski is today spoken in Pakistan to the south of the Pamir language area, Burushaski formerly had a much wider geographic distribution before being assimilated by Indo-Iranian languages.[Blažek, Václav. 2019. Toward the question of Yeniseian homeland in perspective of toponymy. 14th Annual Sergei Starostin Memorial Conference on Comparative-Historical Linguistics. Moscow: RSUH.]
Subgroups
Shughni–Rushani branch
The
Shughni language, Sarikoli, and Yazghulami languages belong to the Shughni-Yazghulami branch. There are about 75,000 speakers of languages in this family in
Afghanistan and
Tajikistan (including the dialects of
Rushani language, Bartangi,
Oroshori dialect,
Khufi language, and
Shughni language). In 1982, there were about 20,000 speakers of Sarikoli in the
Sarikol Valley located in the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in
Xinjiang Province,
China. Shughni and Sarikoli are mutually intelligible.
North Pamiri branch
As of 1994, approximately 4,000 people spoke
Yazghulami, primarily residing along the
Yazgulyam River in
Tajikistan. The language has no established writing system.
The Vanji language was historically spoken in the Vanj river valley, located in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan, and was closely related to the Yazghulami. In the 19th century, following the annexation of the region by the Bukharan Emirate, a campaign of assimilation was carried out. By the end of the century, the Vanji language had become extinct, having been replaced by Tajik language.
Munji–Yidgha branch
The
Munji language and
Yidgha language languages are closely related. There are about 6,000 speakers of
Yidgha language in Upper
Lotkoh Valley recorded in the former
Chitral District of
Pakistan, and in 2008 there were around 5,300 speakers of
Munji language mainly in the Mamalgha and Munjan valleys in the Kuran wa Munjan district of the Badakhshan province in northeastern
Afghanistan. Munji-Yidgha shares with Bactrian a development *ð > , absent from the other three Pamir groups. The extinct
Sarghulami language of Badakhshan is thought to be of the Munji-Yidgha branch.
Sanglechi–Ishkashimi
There are about 2,500 speakers of Sanglechi and Ishkashmi in
Afghanistan and
Tajikistan respectively; they are not written languages.
wakhi_la">
[[Wakhi|Wakhi language
There are around 58,000 speakers of the
Wakhi language in
Afghanistan,
Tajikistan,
China,
Pakistan, and
Russia.
Status
The vast majority of Pamir speakers in Tajikistan and Afghanistan also use
Tajik language (Persian) as a literary language, which is—unlike the languages of the Pamir group—a Southwestern Iranian tongue. The language group is endangered, with the total number of speakers roughly around 100,000 in 1990.
Study
One of the most prolific researchers of the Pamir languages was
Soviet Union linguistics Ivan Zarubin. Linguist Ross Perlin is also leading a Pamir languages research and preservation project at the Endangered Language Alliance.
See also
Bibliography
-
Payne, John, "Pamir languages" in Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum, ed. Schmitt (1989), 417–444.
External links
