Torwali () 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 the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...

mainly spoken in the

Bahrain Bahrain ( ; ; ar, البحرين, al-Bahrayn, locally ), officially the Kingdom of Bahrain, ' is an island country in Western Asia. It is situated on the Persian Gulf, and comprises a small archipelago made up of 50 natural islands and an ...

and Chail areas of the

Swat District Swat District (, ps, سوات ولسوالۍ, ) is a district in the Malakand Division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. With a population of 2,309,570 per the 2017 national census, Swat is the 15th-largest district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa pro ...

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...

. The language and other non-Pashtun communities are often referred to as "Kohistani" which is a name given by the Swat Pashtuns.

Fredrik Barth Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth (22 December 1928 – 24 January 2016) was a Norwegian social anthropologist who published several ethnographic books with a clear formalist view. He was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston Univ ...

says "The

Pathans Pashtuns (, , ; ps, پښتانه, ), also known as Pakhtuns or Pathans, are an Iranian ethnic group who are native to the geographic region of Pashtunistan in the present-day countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were historically re ...

call them, and all other Muhammadans of Indian descent in the Hindu Kush valleys, Kohistanis". The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim communities of Swat. It is the closest modern

still spoken today to ''Niya'', a dialect of Gāndhārī, a

Middle Indo-Aryan language The Middle Indo-Aryan languages (or Middle Indic languages, sometimes conflated with the Prakrits, which are a stage of Middle Indic) are a historical group of languages of the Indo-Aryan family. They are the descendants of Old Indo-Aryan (OIA; ...

spoken in the ancient region of Gandhara. Torwali is an

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

: it is characterised as "definitely endangered" by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

's Atlas of Endangered Languages, and as "vulnerable" by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. There have been efforts to revitalize the language since 2004, and mother tongue community schools have been established by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT).

Phonology

Although descriptions of Torwali phonology have appeared in the literature, some questions still remain unanswered.

Vowels

Edelman's analysis, which was based on Grierson and Morgenstierne, shows nasal counterparts to at least and also found a series of central (reduced?) vowels, transcribed as: , , . Lunsford had some difficulty determining vowel phonemes and suggested there may be retracted vowels with limited distribution: (which may be ), . Retracted or retroflex vowels are also found in Kalash-mondr.

Consonants

The phonemic status of the breathy voiced series is debatable. Sounds with particularly uncertain status are marked with a superscript question mark.

Alphabet

The Torwali language does not have a fixed orthography. There have been many proposals, which have seen limited use by the speakers, though there has been heavy work done for the language in recent years with the help of Zubair Torwali and Rehmat Aziz Chitrali. Here is one of the proposals created by Zubair Torwali which is used in Swat:

Chitrali and Kohistani Alphabet

The Torwali language in Chitral and Kohistan uses loanwords from

Khowar Khowar () or Chitrali, is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in Chitral and surrounding areas in Pakistan. Khowar is the lingua franca of Chitral, and it is also spoken in the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, as we ...

and

Indus Kohistani Indus Kohistani (, Kōstaiñ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the former Kohistan District of Pakistan. The language was referred to as Maiyã (Mayon) or Shuthun by early researchers, but subsequent observations have not verified that these ...

, the dominant languages in the region, which uses another letter, ݲ, which is used to represent . They also use the

Pashto Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...

letter ځ to represent .

References

Bibliography

*Biddulph, John (1880). "Tribes of the Hindukush". * *Ullah, Inam (2004)
"Lexical database of the Torwali Dictionary"
paper presented at the Asia Lexicography Conference, Chiangmai, Thailand, May 24–26. *Endangered Languages Project; http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/3501/guide *SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/zubairtorwali/sets/manjoora-torwali-melodies *Library of Congress https://books.google.com/books?id=JHLalS4Jp1oC&pg=PA7522&lpg=PA7522&dq=Torwali&source=bl&ots=NmYGuAzW7a&sig=ACfU3U1CDV7cwH6W1JF2R6GYYgQ_wkkUqw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcq9qB-u3gAhWx_XMBHWngC244WhDoATABegQIAxAB#v=onepage&q=Torwali&f=false *Jalal Uddin https://paperswithcode.com/paper/a-step-towards-torwali-machine-translation-an * * Ahmad, Aftab (2015) Torvālī Urdū, angrezī lug̲h̲at = Torwali-Urdu-English dictionary https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/243822077

External links

* https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/torwali/ A digital Torwali-English dictionary with audio * https://182.180.102.251:8081/otd/HomePage.aspx/ Online Torwali-Urdu Dictionary (Center for Language Engineering at UET, Lahore Pakistan) * https://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/doc/src/00851-EN.doc (UNESCO Register of Good Practices in Language Preservation) * Jalal Uddin https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-6802 * http://torwaliresearchforums.org/ A website providing information about Torwali language and computational developments made in Torwali language. Jalaluddin * https://web.archive.org/web/20151208134056/http://torwali.base.pk/ A website providing information about the Torwali language and the history of the Torwali people. Includes photos, classification, etc. * https://www.torwali.org a website managed by the Swat based organization Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT) i.e institute for education and development, that works for the integrated development of the ethno-linguistic communities of Pakistan including the Torwalis. * https://torwali.omeka.net/ An Endangered Language Project created by Amber Khan for English 318 at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville *Ahmad, Aftab (2016) Reversing language loss through identity based educational planning—the case of the Torwali language . http://www.lc.mahidol.ac.th/mleconf/2016/Documents/PresentedFiles/Parallel%20VI/T3-9/5C-Aftab%20Ahmad.pdf Dardic languages Languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa {{Pakistan-stub