Zemiaki (Zamyaki) is a

Nuristani language The Nuristani languages, formerly known as Kafiri languages, are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the much larger Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages, Iranian g ...

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- Ha ...

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...

. 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. 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 languages ...

"language of Zemyaki", the native equivalent being ''J̌amlām-am bašā''. It is closely related to

Waigali Waigali (') is a language spoken by about 10,000 Nuristani people of the Waigal Valley in Afghanistan's Nuristan Province. The native name is ''Kalaṣa-alâ'' 'Kalasha-language'. "Waigali" refers to the dialect of the Väy people of the upp ...

, and ancestors of the Zemyakis were, according to local tradition, Waigalis 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 loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...

s, including several common conjunctions. There is no

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...

, but

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original 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 c ...

and

person A person ( : people) is a being that 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 such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

are marked on the verb, following a

split-ergative In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergati ...

pattern of agreement.

References

Bibliography

* {{Languages of Afghanistan Nuristani languages Languages of Afghanistan