Pangwali ( Takri: ) is a Western Pahari language of

Himachal Pradesh Himachal Pradesh (; ; "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterized by an extreme landscape featuring several peak ...

, India. It is spoken in the

Pangi Tehsil Pangi is a tehsil of Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, India. The Pangi Valley is a beautiful and poorly developed tribal area, as well as one of the most remote areas in Himachal Pradesh state. The Pangi Valley is divided into the Saichu, Hudan Bhator ...

of Chamba district, and is threatened to go extinct. Pangwali is natively written in the Takri script, but

Devanagari 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 system), based on the a ...

is used as well.

Classification

The linguist George Abraham Grierson recorded Pangwali as a dialect of Chambeali in his

Linguistic Survey of India The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist ...

. It is now regarded as a language in its own right as a part of the Chamealic group of Western Pahari, affiliated with Chambeali, Bilaspuri,

Bhadarwahi Bhadarwahi is an Indo-Aryan language of the Western Pahari group spoken in the Bhaderwah region of Jammu and Kashmir Jammu and Kashmir may refer to: * Kashmir, the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent * Jammu and Kashmir ...

, among others. Pangwali has about 64% inherent intelligibility with

Mandeali Mandeali ( Takri: ) is a language spoken in northern India, predominantly in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh by the people of the Mandi Valley and particularly in the major city of Mandi. Other spellings for the name are Mandiyali and Ma ...

, 52% with Kangri, 44% with Chambeali, and 50% with Bhadarwahi. Its lexical similarity is 55% with

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of North India, northern, Central India, centr ...

, 77% with

Kullu Pahari Kului (, also known as Kulvi, Takri script, Takri: ) is a Western Pahari language spoken in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Phonology Consonants For the Stop consonant, stops and Affricate consonant, affricates there is a four-way d ...

, and 45% with Bhadarwahi.

Phonology

Pangwali exhibits a fossilized system of

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, me ...

as other languages of the area (such as

Kashmiri Kashmiri may refer to: * People or things related to the Kashmir Valley or the broader region of Kashmir * Kashmiris, an ethnic group native to the Kashmir Valley * Kashmiri language, their language People with the name * Kashmiri Saikia Barua ...

) do. The original conditioning vowels that caused harmony have often been lost, so the system is no longer productive.

Grammar

Since Grierson's sketch of Pangwali, there has been only recently published a grammar of Pangwali written in

by Binaya Sundar Nayak. Both are referenced in this article.

Nouns

Pangwali nouns have

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 ...

, with the two genders being masculine and feminine.

Case markers

Numerals

Geographical distribution

Status

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. Some speakers may even call it a dialect of Punjabi or Dogri. The language has no official status. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is of critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Pangwali are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially. The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari (Himachali)' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations strive to save the language and demand it. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it and having a higher mutual intelligibility with other recognised languages like Dogri and other Western Pahari languages. At the time of the Linguistic Survey of India, 3,701 speakers were estimated of Pangwali.

Dialects

Following are the dialects of the language: # Killar # Purthi # Sach # Dharwasi Killar, being the headquarter of the Tehsil, is the dialect which is widely understood. Sach dialect is said to be the most conservative in regards to

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominalization, nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cul ...

Literature

Tubari Magazine is a recent effort to maintain the language. The magazine uses Devanagari Script. There ar
other
publications which generally describe the language.

Idioms

References

{{Western Pahari languages Northern Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Himachal Pradesh Endangered languages of India