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 the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
Parliament of India
The Parliament of India ( IAST: ) is the supreme legislative body of the Republic of India. It is a bicameral legislature composed of the president of India and two houses: the Rajya Sabha (Council of States) and the Lok Sabha (House of the ...
passed a bill to make Kashmiri an official language of Jammu and Kashmir along with
Dogri
Dogri ( Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prad ...
,
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
There are about 6.8 million speakers of Kashmiri and related dialects in Jammu and Kashmir and amongst the Kashmiri diaspora in other states of India. The precise figures from the 2011 census are 6,554,36 for Kashmiri as a "mother tongue" and 6,797,587 for Kashmiri as a "language" (which includes closely related smaller dialects/languages). Most Kashmiri speakers are located in the Kashmir Valley and other areas of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Kashmir valley, they form a majority.
Kashmiri is spoken by roughly five percent of Azad Kashmir's population. According to the 1998 Pakistan Census, there were 132,450 Kashmiri speakers in Azad Kashmir. Native speakers of the language were dispersed in "pockets" throughout Azad Kashmir, particularly in the districts of
Muzaffarabad
Muzaffarabad (; ur, ) is the capital and largest city of Azad Kashmir, and the 60th largest in Pakistan.
The city is located in Muzaffarabad District, near the confluence of the Jhelum and Neelum rivers. The district is bounded by the Pak ...
(15%), Neelam (20%) and Hattian (15%), with very small minorities in Haveli (5%) and Bagh (2%). The Kashmiri spoken in Muzaffarabad is distinct from, although still intelligible with, the Kashmiri of the Neelam Valley to the north. In Neelam Valley, Kashmiri is the second most widely spoken language and the majority language in at least a dozen or so villages, where in about half of these, it is the sole mother tongue. The Kashmiri dialect of Neelum is closer to the variety spoken in northern Kashmir Valley, particularly
Kupwara
Kupwara is a town and a municipal council in Kupwara district in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
Municipal council Kupwara is an Urban Local Body with 13 elected members (also in Delimitation in progress for wards), which adm ...
. At the
2017 Census of Pakistan
The 2017 Census of Pakistan was a detailed enumeration of the Pakistani population which began on 15 March 2017 and ended on 25 May 2017. It was the first census taken in the country in the 21st century, nineteen years after the previous one in ...
, as many as 350,000 people declared their first language to be Kashmiri.
A process of
language shift
Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are percei ...
is observable among Kashmiri-speakers in Azad Kashmir according to linguist Tariq Rahman, as they gradually adopt local dialects such as Pahari-Pothwari, Hindko or move towards the ''lingua franca''
Urdu
Urdu (;"Urdu" '' This has resulted in these languages gaining ground at the expense of Kashmiri. There have been calls for the promotion of Kashmiri at an official level; in 1983, a Kashmiri Language Committee was set up by the government to patronise Kashmiri and impart it in school-level education. However, the limited attempts at introducing the language have not been successful, and it is Urdu, rather than Kashmiri, that Kashmiri Muslims have seen as their identity symbol. Rahman notes that efforts to organise a Kashmiri language movement have been challenged by the scattered nature of the Kashmiri-speaking community in Azad Kashmir.
The Kashmiri language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. It was a part of the ''eighth Schedule'' in the former constitution of the Jammu and Kashmir. Along with other regional languages mentioned in the ''Sixth Schedule'', as well as Hindi and Urdu, the Kashmiri language was to be developed in the state.
Persian began to be used as the court language in Kashmir during the 14th centuries, under the influence of Islam. It was replaced by Urdu in 1889 during the Dogra rule. In 2020, Kashmiri became an official language in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir for the first time.
Kashmiri is closely related to Poguli and Kishtwari, which are spoken in the mountains to the south of the Kashmir Valley and have sometimes been counted as dialects of Kashmiri.
Phonology
Kashmiri has the following phonemes.
Vowels
The oral vowels are as follows:
:
The short high vowels are near-high, and the low vowels apart from are near-low.
Nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internation ...
is phonemic. All sixteen oral vowels have nasal counterparts.
Consonants
Palatalization is phonemic. All consonants apart from those in the post-alveolar/palatal column have palatalized counterparts.
Archaisms
Kashmiri, as also the other Dardic languages, shows important divergences from the Indo-Aryan mainstream. One is the partial maintenance of the three sibilant consonants ''s ṣ ś'' of the Old Indo-Aryan period. For another example, the prefixing form of the number 'two', which is found in Sanskrit as ''dvi-'', has developed into ''ba-/bi-'' in most other Indo-Aryan languages, but ''du-'' in Kashmiri (preserving the original dental stop ''d''). ''Seventy-two'' is ''dusatath'' in Kashmiri, ''bahattar'' in Hindi-Urdu and Punjabi, and ''dvisaptati'' in Sanskrit.
Certain features in Kashmiri even appear to stem from Indo-Aryan even predating the Vedic period. For instance, there was an /s/ > /h/ consonant shift in some words that had already occurred with Vedic Sanskrit (This tendency was complete in the Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian), yet is lacking in Kashmiri equivalents. The word ''rahit'' in Vedic Sanskrit and modern Hindi-Urdu (meaning 'excluding' or 'without') corresponds to ''rost'' in Kashmiri. Similarly, ''sahit'' (meaning 'including' or 'with') corresponds to ''sost'' in Kashmiri.
Devanagari script
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...
Roman script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic 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 southern Ital ...
is also sometimes informally used to write Kashmiri, especially online.
The Kashmiri language was traditionally written in the Sharada script after the 8th Century A.D. The script grew increasingly unsuitable for writing Kashmiri because it couldn't adequately represent Kashmiri peculiar sounds by the usage of its vowel signs. Therefore, it is not in common use today and is restricted to religious ceremonies of the
Kashmiri Pandit
The Kashmiri Pandits (also known as Kashmiri Brahmins) are a group of Kashmiri Hindus and a part of the larger Saraswat Brahmin community of India. They belong to the Pancha Gauda Brahmin group from the Kashmir Valley, a mountainous region l ...
s.
Today it is written in Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts (with some modifications). Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is one of the scripts that regularly indicates all vowel sounds.
The Perso-Arabic script is recognised as the official script of Kashmiri language by the Jammu and Kashmir government and the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages.
Despite, Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script cutting across religious boundaries and being used by both the Kashmiri Hindus and the Kashmiri Muslims, some attempts have been made to give a religious outlook regarding the script and make Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script to be associated with Kashmiri Muslims, while the Kashmiri Devanagari script to be associated with some sections of
Kashmiri Hindu
Kashmiri Hindus are ethnic Kashmiris who practice Hinduism and are native to the Kashmir Valley of India. With respect to their contributions to Indian philosophy, Kashmiri Hindus developed the tradition of Kashmiri Shaivism. After their exodus ...
community.
Perso-Arabic script
Consonants
Vowels
Devanagari
Consonants
Vowels
There have been a few versions of the devanagari script for Kashmiri.
The 2002 version of the proposal is shown below. This version has readers and more content available on the Internet, even though this is an older proposal.
This version makes use of the vowels ॲ/ऑ and vowel signs
कॅ/कॉ for the schwa-like vowel and elongated schwa-like vowel that also exist in other Devanagari-based scripts such as Marathi and Hindi but are used for the sound of other vowels.
Tabulated below is the latest (2009) version of the proposal to spell the Kashmiri vowels with Devanagari.
The primary change in this version is the changed stand alone characters ॳ / ॴ and vowel signs / for the schwa-like vowel & elongated schwa-like vowel and a new stand alone vowel and vowel sign for the open-mid back rounded vowel which can be used instead of the consonant व standing-in for this vowel.
Sharada script
Consonants
Vowels
''Vowel mark''
Grammar
Kashmiri is a
fusional language
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. ...
with verb-second (V2) word order. Several of Kashmiri's grammatical features distinguish it from other
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
.
Nouns
Kashmiri nouns are inflected according to gender, number and case. There are no articles, nor is there any grammatical distinction for
definiteness
In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those which are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical ...
, although there is some optional adverbial marking for indefinite or "generic" noun qualities.
Gender
The Kashmiri
gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures ...
system is divided into masculine and feminine. Feminine forms are typically generated by the addition of a suffix (or in most cases, a morphophonemic change, or both) to a masculine noun. A relatively small group of feminine nouns have unique suppletion forms that are totally different from the corresponding masculine forms. The following table illustrates the range of possible gender forms:
::
Some nouns borrowed from other languages, such as Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Urdu or English, follow a slightly different gender system. Notably, many words borrowed from Urdu have different genders in Kashmiri.
ablative
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. ...
and
vocative
In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed, or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numer ...
. Case is expressed via suffixation of the noun.
Kashmiri utilizes an ergative-absolutive case structure when the verb is in simple past tense. Thus, in these sentences, the subject of a
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transiti ...
is marked in the ergative case and the object in nominative, which is identical to how the subject of an
intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
is marked. However, in sentences constructed in any other tense, or in past tense sentences with intransitive verbs, a nominative-dative paradigm is adopted, with objects (whether direct or indirect) generally marked in dative case.
Other case distinctions, such as locative,
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to inst ...
comitative
In grammar, the comitative case (; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role (other uses of "with", l ...
and
allative
In grammar, the allative case (; abbreviated ; from Latin ''allāt-'', ''afferre'' "to bring to") is a type of locative grammatical case. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages that do not make finer ...
, are marked by
postpositions
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
rather than suffixation.
Noun morphology
The following table illustrates Kashmiri noun declension according to gender, number and case.
::
Verbs
Kashmiri verbs are declined according to tense 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 prope ...
, and to a lesser extent, gender. Tense, along with certain distinctions of
aspect
Aspect or Aspects may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art
* Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company
* Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England
* ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...
, is formed by the addition of suffixes to the verb stem (minus the infinitive ending - /un/), and in many cases by the addition of various modal auxiliaries. Postpositions fulfill numerous adverbial and semantic roles.
Tense
Present tense in Kashmiri is an auxiliary construction formed by a combination of the copula and the imperfective suffix -/aːn/ added to the verb stem. The various copula forms agree with their subject according to gender and number, and are provided below with the verb /jun/ (to come):
::
Past tense in Kashmiri is significantly more complex than the other tenses, and is subdivided into three past tense distinctions. The simple (sometimes called proximate) past refers to completed past actions. Remote past refers to actions that lack this in-built perfective aspect. Indefinite past refers to actions performed a long time ago, and is often used in historical narrative or storytelling contexts.
As described above, Kashmiri is 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 ...
language; in all three of these past tense forms, the subjects of transitive verbs are marked in the ergative case and direct objects in the nominative. Intransitive subjects are marked in the nominative. Nominative arguments, whether subjects or objects, dictate gender, number and person marking on the verb.
Verbs of the simple past tense are formed via the addition of a suffix to the verb stem, which usually undergoes certain uniform morphophonemic changes. First and third person verbs of this type do not take suffixes and agree with the nominative object in gender and number, but there are second person verb endings. The entire simple past tense paradigm of transitive verbs is illustrated below using the verb /parun/ ("to read"):
::
A group of irregular intransitive verbs (''special intransitives''), take a different set of endings in addition to the morphophonemic changes that affect most past tense verbs.
::
Intransitive verbs in the simple past are conjugated the same as intransitives in the indefinite past tense form.
::
In contrast to the simple past, verb stems are unchanged in the indefinite and remote past, although the addition of the tense suffixes does cause some morphophonetic change. Transitive verbs are declined according to the following paradigm:
::
::
As in the simple past, "special intransitive" verbs take a different set of endings in the indefinite and remote past:
::
::
Regular intransitive verbs also take a different set of endings in the indefinite and remote past, subject to some morphophonetic variation:
::
::
Future tense intransitive verbs are formed by the addition of suffixes to the verb stem:
::
The future tense of transitive verbs, however, is formed by adding suffixes that agree with both the subject and direct object according to number, in a complex fashion:
::
Aspect
There are two main aspectual distinctions in Kashmiri, perfective and imperfective. Both employ a
participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
formed by the addition of a suffix to the verb stem, as well as the fully conjugated auxiliary /aːsun/ ("to be")—which agrees according to gender, number and person with the object (for transitive verbs) or the subject (for intransitive verbs).
Like the auxiliary, the participle suffix used with the perfective aspect (expressing completed or concluded action) agrees in gender and number with the object (for transitive verbs) or subject (for intransitives) as illustrated below:
::
The imperfective (expressing habitual or progressive action) is simpler, taking the participle suffix -/aːn/ in all forms, with only the auxiliary showing agreement. A type of iterative aspect can be expressed by reduplicating the imperfective participle.
Pronouns
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...
s are declined according to person, gender, number and case, although only third person pronouns are overtly gendered. Also in third person, a distinction is made between three degrees of proximity, called proximate, remote I and remote II.
::
::
::
::
There is also a dedicated genitive pronoun set, in contrast to the way that the genitive is constructed adverbially elsewhere. As with future tense, these forms agree with both the subject and direct object in person and number.
::
Adjectives
There are two kinds of adjectives in Kashmiri, those that agree with their referent noun (according to case, gender and number) and those that are not declined at all. Most adjectives are declined, and generally take the same endings and gender-specific stem changes as nouns. The declinable adjective endings are provided in the table below, using the adjective /wɔzul/ ("red"):
::
Among those adjectives not declined are adjectives that end in -lad or -a, adjectives borrowed from other languages, and a few isolated irregulars.
The comparative and superlative forms of adjectives are formed with the words ''tsor'' ("more") and ''sitha'' ("most"), respectively.
Numerals
Within the Kashmir language, numerals are separated into
cardinal numbers
In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. The ...
and
ordinal numbers
In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is a generalization of ordinal numerals (first, second, th, etc.) aimed to extend enumeration to infinite sets.
A finite set can be enumerated by successively labeling each element with the least ...
. These numeral forms, as well as their aggregative (both, all the five, etc.), multiplicative (two times, four times, etc.), and emphatic forms (only one, only three, etc.) are provided by the table below.
:: The ordinal number "1st" which is for its masculine genre and for its feminine genre is also known as and respectively.
Vocabulary
Kashmiri 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 the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
and was heavily influenced by
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
loanwords. In modern times, Kashmiri vocabulary has been imported from Hindustani and Punjabi.
Preservation of old Indo-Aryan vocabulary
Kashmiri retains several features of Old Indo-Aryan that have been lost in other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi. Some vocabulary features that Kashmiri preserves clearly date from the
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
era and had already been lost even in Classical Sanskrit. This includes the word-form ''yodvai'' (meaning ''if''), which is mainly found in Vedic Sanskrit texts. Classical Sanskrit and modern Indo-Aryan use the word ''yadi'' instead.
First person pronoun
Both the Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches of the Indo-Iranian family have demonstrated a strong tendency to eliminate the distinctive first person pronoun ("I") used in the nominative (subject) case. The Indo-European root for this is reconstructed as *eǵHom, which is preserved in Sanskrit as ''aham'' and in Avestan Persian as ''azam''. This contrasts with the ''m-'' form ("me", "my") that is used for the accusative, genitive, dative, ablative cases. Sanskrit and Avestan both used forms such as ''ma(-m)''. However, in languages such as Modern Persian, Baluchi, Hindi and Punjabi, the distinct nominative form has been entirely lost and replaced with ''m-'' in words such as ''ma-n'' and ''mai''. However, Kashmiri belongs to a relatively small set that preserves the distinction. 'I' is ''ba/bi/bo'' in various Kashmiri dialects, distinct from the other ''me'' terms. 'Mine' is ''myon'' in Kashmiri. Other Indo-Aryan languages that preserve this feature include
Dogri
Dogri ( Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prad ...
(''aun'' vs ''me-''), Gujarati (''hu-n'' vs ''ma-ri''), Konkani (''hā̃v'' vs ''mhazo''), and Braj (''hau-M'' vs ''mai-M''). The Iranian
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 langua ...
preserves it too (''za'' vs. ''maa'').
Variations
There are very minor differences between the Kashmiri spoken by Hindus and Muslims. For 'fire', a traditional Hindu uses the word while a Muslim more often uses the Arabic word .
Sample text
Perso-Arabic script
Art. 1 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, ...
:
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Sharada script
Verses by
Lalleshwari
Lalleshwari, also known locally as Lal Ded (; 1320–1392), was a Kashmiri mystic of the Kashmir Shaivism school of Hindu philosophy. She was the creator of the style of mystic poetry called vatsun or ''Vakhs'', literally "speech" (from Sanskr ...
:
"I kept reciting the unique divine word "Om" and kept it safe in my heart through my resolute dedication and love. I was simply ash and by its divine grace got metamorphosed into gold."
One who recites the divine word "Omkār" by devotion is capable to build a bridge between his own and the cosmic consciousness. By staying committed to this sacred word, one doesn't require any other mantra out of thousands others.