The Yidgha language () is an Eastern Iranian language of the Pamir group spoken in the upper Lotkoh Valley (Tehsil Lotkoh) of

Chitral Chitral () is a city situated on the Kunar River, Chitral River in northern area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It serves as the capital of the Lower Chitral District, and was previously the capital of Chitral District, and before ...

in the

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (; ; , ; abbr. KP or KPK), formerly known as the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is a Administrative units of Pakistan, province of Pakistan. Located in the Northern Pakistan, northwestern region of the country, Khyber ...

province of

Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...

. Yidgha is similar to the Munji language spoken on the Afghan side of the border. The Garam Chashma area became important during the

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until it dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the largest country by are ...

because the Soviets were unable to stop the flow of arms and men back and forth across the Dorah Pass that separates Chitral from

Badakshan Badakhshan is a historical region comprising the Wakhan Corridor in northeast Afghanistan, eastern Tajikistan, and Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Badakhshan Province is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. Much of historic Ba ...

in Afghanistan. Almost the entire Munji-speaking population of Afghanistan fled across the border to Chitral during the War in Afghanistan.

Name

According to Georg Morgenstierne (1931), the name ''Yidgha'' probably derives from ''*(h)ind(a,i)-ka-'', likely referring to the part of the Munji tribe that settled on the "Indian" or "Indo-Aryan" side near the Lotkoh Valley. Ľubomír Novák (2013) revises the reconstruction as ''*hindū̆-ka-ka-'', with the same assumption.

Alphabet

Yidgha uses the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

. The Yidgha alphabet has 45 letters and is based on 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 ...

. Retroflexes that don't exist in Urdu have been borrowed from the

Khowar alphabet The Khowar alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Khowar language. It is a modification of the Urdu alphabet, which is itself a derivative of the Persian alphabet and Arabic alphabet and uses the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq, Nastaʿl� ...

. The Yidgha alphabet is unusual among Pakistani alphabets as it places the letters ٹ after ث and ڈ after ذ, unlike in Urdu. Alveolar affricate letters ts and dz were borrowed from the Pashto alphabet. It also places the letter ڤ after ق.

Letters

Vowels

Yidgha language has 8 vowels: A a (/a/), Ā ā (/aː/), I i (/i/), Ī (/iː/), U u (/u/), Ū ū (/uː/), E e (/eː/) and O o (/oː/). The rules for writing vowels are same as in the

, short vowels at the end of word are written with the 3 vowel diacritics followed by ہ, and the combinations of Zabar + ye (َی) and zabar + wāw (َو) are read as /aj/ and /aw/ and not as single vowels like in Urdu.

Study

The Yidgha language has not been given serious study by linguists, except that it is mentioned by Georg Morgenstierne (1926), Kendall Decker (1992) and Badshah Munir Bukhari (2005). A 280-page joint description of Yidgha and Munji (descriptive and historical phonetics and grammar, glossary with etymologies where possible) is given by Morgenstierne (1938). Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote that Chitral is the area of the greatest linguistic diversity in the worl

Although Khowar language, Khowar is the predominant language of Chitral, more than ten other languages are spoken here. These include

Kalasha-mun Kalasha (, locally: ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Kalash people, in the Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. There are an estimated 7,466 speakers of Kalasha according to the 2023 Census of Pakistan. It ...

, Palula, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, the Madaglashti dialect of Persian, and

Pashto Pashto ( , ; , ) is an eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family, natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. It has official status in Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyb ...

. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in

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 ...

, a modified script adapted from Persian.

Name

Alphabet

Letters

Vowels

Study

See also

References

Further reading