Kohati Gate

Kohāṭī is a Hindko dialect of Kohat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, north-western Pakistan. It is spoken in the city of Kohat as well as in a string of villages running east along the road to Kushalgarh on the Indus. The dominant language of this area is Pashto, to which Kohati has been losing ground at least since Partition. Kohati is closely related to the Hindko dialects to the east: Awankari, Chacchi and Ghebi.

It has borrowed words from Pashto to a higher extent than other Hindko dialects. A lexical similarity study based on a 210-item wordlist found out that it shares 79% of its vocabulary with the Hindko dialect spoken to the east in the city of Attock, and 76% each with the dialects further east in Talagang Tehsil and Haripur District, as well as the rural dialect spoken immediately north in Peshawar District.

Phonology

The plosive consonants of Kohati can take four phonation types: voiceless (), aspirated (), voiced (), and voiced aspirated (.

The fricatives , and (and to a lesser extent ) are found in loanwords from Iranian languages, as well as in native words, where they are allophones of the corresponding plosives, normally before other consonants ( 'saying' vs. 'said').

Kohati has a single tone: the high-falling (indicated here using a circumflex accent over the vowel: ). This tone is present on vowels if they were historically followed by or by a voiced aspirate: 'way' <- , 'half' <- . Voiced aspiration, however, was preserved before a stressed vowel: 'brother'.
Kohati shares with other Hindko varieties a historical "spontaneous" aspiration: 'one', as well as the preservation of the consonant cluster at the start of a word: 'three'.

There are two phonological characteristics which distinguish Kohati from other Hindko varieties. One is the regular loss of nasalisation in rounded vowels at the end of a word (''tũ'' > ''tu'' 'you'). The other one is the peculiar realisation of historical ''-dʒ-'' as ''-i-'', almost ''-yy-'', in the word ''ʌi'' 'today' and in forms of the verb 'to go', for example ''vʌ̃ie'' 'let him go' (in contrast respectively to ''ʌdʒ'' and ''vʌɳdʒe'' in the rest of Hindko).

Grammar

Kohati has a peculiar distribution of the dative-accusative postposition. As in other Indo-Aryan languages, the form of the noun used before postpositions is the oblique: ''pʊttʊr'' 'son' for example has the oblique form ''pʊtre''. To this form Kohati appends the postposition ''ã'' to form the dative-accusative: ''pʊtre ã'' '(to) the son', which is the pattern found in the rest of Hindko (in contrast to Punjabi where the postpostion is ''nũ'' or Saraiki, where it is ''kũ''). But because the oblique form in the plural is also ''-ã'', Kohati avoids the succession of identical vowels by switching to ''ko'' in the plural: thus ''pʊtrã ko'' '(to) the sons'.

References

Bibliography

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* A grammar sketch is found on pages 486–96.

{{Punjabi dialects

Punjabi dialects
Languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Kohat District