Kashmiri language


Kashmiri, also known by its endonym Koshur, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic branch spoken by around 7 million Kashmiris of the Kashmir region, primarily in the Kashmir Valley and surrounding hills of the Indian-administrated union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, over half the population of that territory. Kashmiri has split ergativity and the unusual verb-second word order.
Since 2020, it has been made an official language of Jammu and Kashmir along with Dogri, Hindi, Urdu and English. Kashmiri is also among the 22 scheduled languages of India.
Kashmiri is spoken by roughly five percent of Pakistani-administrated Azad Kashmir's population.

Geographic distribution and status

There are about 6.8 million speakers of Kashmiri and related dialects in Jammu and Kashmir and amongst the Kashmiri diaspora in other states of India. Most Kashmiri speakers are located in the Kashmir Valley and other surrounding areas of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Kashmir Valley, Kashmiri speakers form the majority.
The Kashmiri language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It was a part of the Eighth Schedule in the former constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. Along with other regional languages mentioned in the Sixth Schedule, as well as Hindi and Urdu, the Kashmiri language was to be developed in the state. After Hindi, Kashmiri is the second fastest growing language of India, followed by Meitei as well as Gujarati in the third place, and Bengali in the fourth place, according to the 2011 census of India.
Persian began to be used as the court language in Kashmir during the 14th centuries, under the influence of Islam. It was replaced by Urdu in 1889 during the Dogra rule. In 2020, Kashmiri became an official language in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir for the first time. Poguli and Kishtwari are closely related to Kashmiri, which are spoken in the mountains to the south of the Kashmir Valley and have sometimes been counted as dialects of Kashmiri.
Kashmiri is spoken by roughly five percent of Azad Kashmir's population. According to the 1998 Pakistan Census, there were 132,450 Kashmiri speakers in Azad Kashmir. Native speakers of the language were dispersed in "pockets" throughout Azad Kashmir, particularly in the districts of Muzaffarabad, Neelam and Hattian, with very small minorities in Haveli and Bagh. The Kashmiri spoken in Muzaffarabad is distinct from, although still intelligible with, the Kashmiri of the Neelam Valley to the north. In Neelam Valley, Kashmiri is the second most widely spoken language and the majority language in at least a dozen or so villages, where in about half of these, it is the sole mother tongue. The Kashmiri dialect of Neelum is closer to the variety spoken in northern Kashmir Valley, particularly Kupwara. At the 2017 Census of Pakistan, as many as 350,000 people declared their first language to be Kashmiri.
A process of language shift is observable among Kashmiri-speakers in Azad Kashmir according to linguist Tariq Rahman, as they gradually adopt local languages such as Pahari-Pothwari, Hindko or move towards the lingua franca Urdu. This has resulted in these languages gaining ground at the expense of Kashmiri. There have been calls for the promotion of Kashmiri at an official level; in 1983, a Kashmiri Language Committee was set up by the government to patronise Kashmiri and impart it in school-level education. However, the limited attempts at introducing the language have not been successful, and it is Urdu, rather than Kashmiri, that Kashmiri Muslims of Azad Kashmir have seen as their identity symbol. Rahman notes that efforts to organise a Kashmiri language movement have been challenged by the scattered nature of the Kashmiri-speaking community in Azad Kashmir.

Phonology

Kashmiri has a very large phoneme inventory: 32 vowels and 62 consonants, giving that vowel nasalization and consonant palatalization are phonemic and not phonetic. It has the following phonemes.

Vowels

The oral vowels are as follows:
The short high vowels are near-high, and the low vowels apart from are near-low.
Nasalization is phonemic. All sixteen oral vowels have nasal counterparts.

Consonants

is phonemic. All consonants apart from those in the post-alveolar/palatal column have palatalized counterparts.

Archaisms

Kashmiri, as also the other Dardic languages, shows important divergences from the Indo-Aryan mainstream. One is the partial maintenance of the three sibilant consonants s ṣ ś of the Old Indo-Aryan period. For another example, the prefixing form of the number 'two', which is found in Sanskrit as dvi-, has developed into ba-/bi- in most other Indo-Aryan languages, but du- in Kashmiri. Seventy-two is dusatath in Kashmiri, bahattar in Hindi-Urdu and Punjabi, and dvisaptati in Sanskrit.

Writing system

There are three orthographical systems used to write the Kashmiri language: the Perso-Arabic script, the Devanagari script and the Sharada script. The Roman script is also sometimes informally used to write Kashmiri, especially online.
The Kashmiri language was traditionally written in the Sharada script from the 8th Century AD onwards. Between the 8th and the first quarter of the 20th century AD, Sharada was the primary script of inscriptional and literary production in Kashmir for Sanskrit and Kashmiri. With increased use of Persian script for writing Kashmiri in the 19th century AD, and the growth of other brahmic scripts such as Devanagari and Takri, the use of Sharada declined. The Sharada script is inadequate for writing modern Kashmiri because it lacks sufficient signs to represent Kashmiri vowels. Modern usage of Sharada is limited to religious ceremonies and rituals of Kashmiri Pandits, and for horoscope-writing by them.
Today Kashmiri is primarily written in Perso-Arabic. Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is one of the scripts that regularly indicates all vowel sounds.
The Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script is recognized as the official script of Kashmiri language by the Jammu and Kashmir government and the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages. The Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script has been derived from Persian alphabet. The consonant inventory and their corresponding pronunciations of Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script doesn't differ from Perso-Arabic script, with the exception of the letter ژ, which is pronounced as instead of. However, the vowel inventory of Kashmiri is significantly larger than other Perso-Arabic derived or influenced South Asian Perso-Arabic scripts. There are 17 vowels in Kashmiri, shown with diacritics, letters, or both. In Kashmiri, the convention is that most vowel diacritics are written at all times.
Despite Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script cutting across religious boundaries and being used by both the Kashmiri Hindus and the Kashmiri Muslims, some attempts have been made to give a religious outlook regarding the script and make Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script to be associated with Kashmiri Muslims, while the Kashmiri Devanagari script to be associated with some sections of Kashmiri Hindu community.

Perso-Arabic script

Consonants

Vowels

Devanagari

Consonants

Vowels

There have been a few versions of the Devanagari script for Kashmiri.
The 2002 version of the proposal is shown below. This version has readers and more content available on the Internet, even though this is an older proposal.
This version makes use of the vowels ॲ/ऑ and vowel signs
कॅ/कॉ for the schwa-like vowel and elongated schwa-like vowel that also exist in other Devanagari-based scripts such as Marathi and Hindi but are used for the sound of other vowels.
Letter''ॲ''''''''''''''ं
IPA
Transliterationaāạạ̄iīüǖuūeēaioōọ̄ọ ̃
Vowel mark indicated on consonant k or

Tabulated below is the latest version of the proposal to spell the Kashmiri vowels with Devanagari.
The primary change in this version is the changed stand alone characters ॳ / ॴ and vowel signs / for the schwa-like vowel & elongated schwa-like vowel and a new stand alone vowel and vowel sign for the open-mid back rounded vowel which can be used instead of the consonant व standing-in for this vowel.
Letter''ॳॴ''ॶॷ''ऎ''ऒ''ं
IPA
Transliterationaāạạ̄iīüǖuūeēaioōọ̄ọ ̃
Vowel mark indicated on consonant k