Zemiaki is a
Nuristani language spoken by some 400–500 people in the
Kunar Province
Kunar (Pashto: ; Dari: ) is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the northeastern part of the country. Its capital is Asadabad. Its population is estimated to be 508,224. Kunar's major political groups include Wahhabis or Ahl-e- ...
of
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
.
It is named after the settlement in which it is spoken, from the
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 ...
"language of Zemyaki", the native equivalent being ''J̌amlām-am bašā''. It is closely related to
Nuristani Kalasha, and ancestors of the Zemyakis were, according to local tradition, Kalasha people who migrated into the area several centuries ago. The language spoken in the surrounding areas is Pashto, and it has been a source of a large number of
lexical borrowing
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing (linguistics), borrowing. Borrowing ...
s, including several common
conjunctions.
There is no
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 ...
, but
number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
and
person
A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...
are marked on the verb, following a
split-ergative pattern of agreement.
It was thought that Zemiaki is a dialect of
Grangali, an
Indo-Aryan language. However, its pronouns are characteristically Nuristani, with a close relationship to
Nuristani Kalasha, which is confirmed by local tradition.
Vocabulary
Pronouns
Numbers
# ''yok''
# ''du''
# ''tre''
# ''-''
# ''-''
# ''-''
# ''-''
# ''-''
# ''-''
# ''doš''
References
Bibliography
*
{{Languages of Afghanistan
Nuristani languages
Languages of Afghanistan