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|---|---|
| کھوار | |
| Native to | Pakistan, China, |
| Native speakers | (240,000 cited 1992–2000) |
| Language family | Indo-European
|
| Writing system | Khowar alphabet Nastaʿlīq script |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | khw |
| ELP | Khowar |
| Linguasphere | 59-AAB-aa |
Khowar (کھوار), is an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic branch, spoken by 240,000 people in Chitral in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the Ghizer district of Gilgit-Baltistan (including the Yasin Valley, Phandar Ishkoman and Gupis), and in parts of Upper Swat. Speakers of Khowar have also migrated heavily to Pakistan's major urban centres with Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, having sizeable populations. It is spoken as a second language in the rest of Gilgit and Hunza. There are believed to be small numbers of Khowar speakers in China, Tajikistan and India.
Khowar has been influenced by Iranian languages to a greater degree than other Dardic languages, and less by Sanskrit than Shina or the Kohistani languages. John Biddulph (Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh) was among the first westerners to study Khowar and claimed that further research would prove Khowar to be equally derived from "Zend" (Avestan, Old Persian) and Sanskrit.
The Norwegian Linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote that Chitral is the area of the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Although Khowar is the predominant language of Chitral, more than ten other languages are spoken here. These include Kalasha-mondr, Palula, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gojri, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persian and Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu, Pakistan's national language.
Khowar is designated as one of 14 regional languages of Chitral, Pakistan.
Phonology
Khowar has a variety of dialects which may vary phonemically. The following tables lay out the basic phonology of Khowar.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Open | a |
Khowar may also have nasalized vowels and a series of long vowels /aː/, /eː/, /iː/, /oː/, and /uː/. 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 language, Khowar does not have retroflex vowels.
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Post-velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ||||||
| Stop | Voiceless | p | t | ʈ | k | (q) | ||
| [[Aspiration (phonetic | ||||||||
- Khowar at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
- ^ Edelman, D. I. (1983). The Dardic and Nuristani Languages. Moscow: Institut vostokovedenii︠a︡ (Akademii︠a︡ nauk SSSR). p. 210.
- ^ Bashir, Elena L. (1988), "Topics in Kalasha Syntax: An areal and typological perspective" (PDF), Ph.d Dissertation, University of Michigan: 37–40
- Bashir, Elena L., Maula Nigah and Rahmat Karim Baig, A Digital Khowar-English Dictionary with Audio
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