Pangwali ( Takri: ) is a Western Pahari language of

Himachal Pradesh Himachal Pradesh (; ; "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterized by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks ...

, India. It is spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of

Chamba district Chamba 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 of nort ...

, 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 scri ...

, but

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

is used as well.

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 linguist ...

. It is now regarded as a language in its own right as a part of the Chamealic group of Western Pahari, affiliated with Chambeali, Bilaspuri, Bhadarwahi, among others. Pangwali has about 64% inherent intelligibility with Mandeali, 52% with Kangri, 44% with Chambeali, and 50% with Bhadarwahi. Its lexical similarity is 55% with

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

, 77% with Kullu Pahari, and 45% with Bhadarwahi.

Phonology

Pangwali exhibits a fossilized system of

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, mea ...

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

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

Nouns

Pangwali nouns have

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

, 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 Dogri ( Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prad ...

. 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 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 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 (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

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