Pangwali
Pangwali is an Indo-Aryan language. It is spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of Chamba district, and is threatened to go extinct. Pangwali is natively written in the Takri script, but Devanagari is used as well. It is very similar to the Padderi language of Padder, J&K.
Classification
The linguist George Abraham Grierson recorded Pangwali as a dialect of Chambeali in his Linguistic Survey of India. It is now regarded as a language in its own right as a part of Western Pahari, affiliated with Bhadarwahi, Padderi among others. The language also shares a lot of vocabulary and grammatical features with Kashmiri language.Pangwali has about 90% inherent intelligibility with Padderi, 24% with Mandeali, 22% with Kangri, 44% with Chambeali, and 75% with Bhadarwahi. Its lexical similarity, 27% with Kullu Pahari, and 75% with Bhadarwahi.
Phonology
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Near-close | |||
| Close-mid | |||
| Open-mid | |||
| Near-open | |||
| Open |
Pangwali exhibits a fossilised system of vowel harmony as other languages of the area do. The original conditioning vowels that caused harmony have often been lost, so the system is no longer productive.
Grammar
Since Grierson's sketch of Pangwali, there has been only recently published a grammar of Pangwali written in Hindi by Binaya Sundar Nayak. Both are referenced in this article.Nouns
Pangwali nouns have grammatical gender, with the two genders being masculine and feminine.Case markers
| Relation | Marker |
| Instrumental | जे jē, बलि bali |
| Dative | जे jē |
| Ablative | केंइ kēin, पुठ / पिठ puṭh/piṭh, -ए -ē |
| Genitive | -ए -ē |
Numerals
| Numeral | Pangwali | IPA |
| 1 | यक yak | |
| 2 | दुई duī | |
| 3 | ट्लाय ṭlāy | |
| 4 | चेउर ceur | |
| 5 | पंच pāṃc | |
| 6 | छे : chea | |
| 7 | सत sat | |
| 8 | आठ āṭh | |
| 9 | नो nou | |
| 10 | दश daś |
Geographical distribution
Status
The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. Some speakers may even call it a dialect of Punjabi or Dogri. The language has no official status. No efforts have been made to even correctly classify the language. The language despite of being spoken in Himachal Pradesh shares most of its features with the neighbouring languages of the rest chenab valley. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is of critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Pangwali are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially.The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari ' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations strive to save the language and demand it. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it and having a higher mutual intelligibility with other recognised languages like Dogri and other Western Pahari languages.
At the time of the Linguistic Survey of India, 3,701 speakers were estimated of Pangwali.
Dialects
Following are the dialects of the language:- Killar
- Purthi
- Sach
- Dharwasi