Urtsuniwar

Urtsuniwar or Urchuniwar is a dialect of the Kalasha-mun spoken in the Urtsun Valley of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The total number of speakers is estimated to be around 2,900–5,700 peoples.

Similarity

It has been debated whether Urtsuniwar is a distinct language or a dialect of Kalasha-mun. Urtsuniwar and Kalasha-mun exhibit 70% mutual intelligibility. Urtsuniwar also shares some similarities with the Ushojo.

The Kafirs of Urtsun were among the last pagans in Afghanistan and Pakistan to convert to Islam in the mid-1900s. The last Urtsun Kafir was Mranzi, who had married a Kalasha from the Biriu valley and moved out of the valley in 1940, just as the conversion to Islam was completed. They renamed their language from Kalasha-mun to Urtsuniwar and later borrowed heavily from the Khowar, changing their identity. Subsequently, Urtsuniwar started to diverge into a distinct dialect of Kalasha-mun.