Pangwali (

Takri The Tākri script (Takri (Chamba district, Chamba): ; Takri (Jammu Division, Jammu/Dogri script, Dogra): ; sometimes called Tankri ) is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic scripts, Brahmic family of scripts. It is derived from the Sharada ...

: ) is an

Indo-Aryan language The Indo-Aryan languages, or sometimes Indic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of 2024, there are more than 1.5 billion speakers, primarily concentrated east of the Indus river in Ba ...

. It is spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of

Chamba district Chamba district is the northwestern district of Himachal Pradesh, in India, with its headquarters in Chamba town. The towns of Dalhousie, Khajjhiar and Churah Valley are popular hill stations and vacation spots for the people from the plains ...

, and is threatened to go extinct. Pangwali is natively written in the

Takri script The Tākri script (Takri ( Chamba): ; Takri (Jammu/Dogra): ; sometimes called Tankri ) is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts. It is derived from the Sharada script formerly employed for Kashmiri. It is the sister scrip ...

, but

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

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 The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a lingu ...

. It is now regarded as a language in its own right as a part of

Western Pahari The Western Pahari languages are a range of languages and dialects of Northern Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the western parts of the Himalayan range, primarily in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. They are also spoken in Jammu and Jaunsar ...

, affiliated with Bhadarwahi, Padderi among others. Pangwali has about 90% inherent intelligibility with Padderi, 24% with

Mandeali Mandeali (Takri script, Takri: ) is a Western Pahari language, spoken in northern India, predominantly in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh by the people of the Mandi Valley and particularly in the major city of Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, Man ...

, 22% with Kangri, 44% with Chambeali, and 75% with Bhadarwahi. Its lexical similarity , 27% with Kullu Pahari, and 75% with Bhadarwahi.

Phonology

Pangwali exhibits a fossilized system of

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

as other languages of the area (such as Kashmiri) 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 Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

by Binaya Sundar Nayak. Both are referenced in this article.

Nouns

Pangwali nouns have

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

, with the two genders being masculine and feminine.

Case markers

Numerals

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. 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 (Himachali)' 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

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 Killar, being the headquarter of the Tehsil, is the dialect which is widely understood. Sach dialect is said to be the most conservative in regards to

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

Literature

Tubari Magazine is a recent effort to maintain the language. The magazine uses Devanagari Script. There ar
other
publications which generally describe the language.

Idioms

References

{{Western Pahari languages Northern Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Himachal Pradesh Endangered languages of India Languages written in Devanagari Languages listed as Hindi dialects in latest census