Torwali (Torwali: ), also known as Bahrain Kohistani, 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 ...

spoken by the

Torwali people The Torwali people are an Indo-Aryan peoples, Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group located in the Swat District, Swat district of Pakistan. The Torwali people have a culture that values the telling of folktales and music that is played using the sit ...

, and concentrated in the

Bahrain Bahrain, officially the Kingdom of Bahrain, is an island country in West Asia. Situated on the Persian Gulf, it comprises a small archipelago of 50 natural islands and an additional 33 artificial islands, centered on Bahrain Island, which mak ...

and Chail areas in the Swat Kohistan region of the

Swat A SWAT (''Special Weapons and Tactics'') team is a generic term for a police tactical unit within the United States, though the term has also been used by other nations. SWAT units are generally trained, equipped, and deployed to res ...

District in

northern Pakistan Northern Pakistan ( ) is a tourism region in northern and north-western parts of Pakistan, comprising the administrative units of Gilgit-Baltistan (formerly known as '' Northern Areas''), Azad Kashmir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Islamabad Capita ...

. 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 spoken in the ancient region of

Gandhara Gandhara () was an ancient Indo-Aryan people, Indo-Aryan civilization in present-day northwest Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan. The core of the region of Gandhara was the Peshawar valley, Peshawar (Pushkalawati) and Swat valleys extending ...

. Torwali and Gawri languages are collectively classified as "Swat Kohistani". The words "Kohistan" and Kohistani are generi
terms
Kohistan in Persian and in Urdu means as "land of mountains" whereas "Kohistani" refers to 'language spoken in the land mountains" or 'people of the mountains. Joan Baart is the only author who used the term "Bahrain Kohistani" for the Torwali language. Ethnologue, twenty seventh edition suggests Kohistani, Torwalak, Torwalik and Turvali as alternative names for the language while Torwali as an autonym for it. 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 langua ...

: it is characterised as "definitely endangered" by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

'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 wa Taraqi (Institute for Education and Development) (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. The existing and widely used Torwali Character set was proposed by Inam Ullah, who proposed representations for unique sounds in Torwali language which later received official designations from the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

with the support of

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

in 2005. The Torwali orthography was developed by Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (IBT) i.e. institute for education and development from 2005-2008 wherein text books for children were developed along with the Alphabet book and primer in Torwali under the Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education program by the abovementioned organization.

Letters

The Torwali alphabet has 46 letters. It uses all 39 letters of the

Urdu alphabet The Urdu alphabet () is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has co-official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Afri ...

plus 7 additional letters. There are 16 aspirated consonants in Torwali represented by digraphs with the letter ھ: * بھ (bh) * پھ (ph) * تھ (th) * ٹھ (ṭh) * جھ (jh) * چھ (čh) * ڇھ (c̣h, ĉh) * دھ (dh) * ڈھ (ḍ) * رھ (rh) * ڑھ (ṛh) * کھ (kh) * گھ (gh) * لھ (lh) * مھ (mh) * نھ (nh) There is also another digraph, نگ, (transliterated in

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

as ng), and it represents the sound /ŋ/. The letter ے is used for the /e/ sound, and can also appear at the middle of a word, unlike in Urdu where it appears only at the end of a word. The letters ځ and ݨ are used in Pashto loanwords (ݨ for Pashto ڼ), while the letters ث, ح, ذ, ز, ص, ض, ط, ظ, ع, ف and ق are only used in loanwords from

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and Persian.Omniglot Torwali also uses the letter ٲ for the /æ/ sound, at the beginning, middle or end of word, and is transliterated æ in Latin script. This letter is not part of the Alphabetical order. The letter ا can represent both /a/ (also represented by zabar / fatha َ) or /ə/.

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&dq=Torwali&pg=PA7522 *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

An online source, the website of IBT where efforts of revitalizing the Torwali language can be found along with resources in and about the Torwal
language
* 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 {{Authority control Dardic languages Languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Tonal languages in non-tonal families