# Khowar

Khowar (Khowar: کھوار زبان, romanized: khowār, IPA:), or Chitrali, is a Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan language family primarily spoken in Chitral and surrounding areas in Pakistan.
Khowar is the lingua franca of Chitral, and it is also spoken in the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, as well in the Upper Swat district.
Speakers of Khowar have also migrated heavily to Pakistan's major urban centres, with Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi having significant populations. It is also spoken as a second language by the Kalash people.

## Names

The native name of the language is Khō-wār, meaning "language" (wār) of the Kho people. The word Khō-wār is a cognate with the Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian говор (pronounced "govor," meaning "speech"), with the unstable "г" subject to palatalization (as in other related languages, such as the Czech cognate hovor). During the British Raj it was known to the English as Chitrālī (a derived adjective from the name of the Chitral region) or Qāshqārī. Among the Pashtuns and Badakhshanis it is known as Kashkār. Another name, used by Leitner in 1880, is Arnyiá or Arniya, derived from the Shina language name for the part of the Yasin (a valley in Gilgit-Baltistan) where Khowar is spoken.

## History

The Khowar language expanded throughout Chitral from the northern part of the region, specifically from the Mulkhow and Torkhow Valley. According to Morgenstierne, the original abode of the Khowar language was northern Chitral in the valleys around Mastuj. The Khowar language started expanding into southern Chitral around the early 14th century.
Khowar shares a great number of morphological characteristics with neighbouring Iranian languages of Badakhshan, pointing to a very early location of proto-Khowar in its original abode in Upper Chitral, although from its links with the Gandhari language, it likely came from further south in the first millennium BC, possibly through Swat and Dir.
Georg Morgenstierne noted, "Khowar, in many respects [is] the most archaic of all modern Indian languages, retaining a great part of Sanskrit case inflexion, and retaining many words in a nearly Sanskritic form".$^{:3}$

## Phonology

Khowar has a variety of dialects, which may vary phonemically. The following tables lay out the basic phonology of Khowar.

### Vowels

| | Front | Central | Back |
| Close | i | | u |
| Mid | ɛ | | ɔ |
| Open | | ɑ | |
Khowar may also have nasalized vowels and a series of long vowels /ɑː/, /ɛː/, /iː/, /ɔː/, and /uː/. Sources are inconsistent on whether length is phonemic, with one author stating "vowel-length is observed mainly as a substitute one. The vowel-length of phonological value is noted far more rarely." Unlike the neighboring and related Kalasha language, Khowar does not have retroflex vowels.

### Consonants

| | | Labial | Coronal | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Post- velar | Glottal |
| Nasal | Nasal | m | n | | | | | |
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | ʈ | | k | q | |
| Stop | voiced | b | d | ɖ | | ɡ | | |
| Stop | aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | ʈʰ | | kʰ | | |
| Affricate | voiceless | | ts | ʈʂ | tɕ | | | |
| Affricate | voiced | | dz | ɖʐ | dʑ | | | |
| Affricate | aspirated | | tsʰ | ʈʂʰ | tɕʰ | | | |
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʂ | ɕ | x | | h |
| Fricative | voiced | | z | ʐ | ʑ | ɣ | | |
| Approximant | Approximant | ʋ | l(ʲ) ɫ | | j | (w) | | |
| Rhotic | Rhotic | | ɾ | | | | | |
Allophones of /x ɣ h ʋ ɾ/ are heard as sounds [χ ʁ ɦ w ɹ]. /q x ɣ f/ are restricted to Perso-Arabic loanwords in most IA languages but they occur natively in Khowar.

### Tone

Khowar, like many Dardic languages, has either phonemic tone or stress distinctions.

## Orthography

Khowar orthography is derived from Urdu alphabet, with additional letters created to represent sounds unique to Khowar. Similar to Urdu, Khowar is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script.
From the end of the 19th century onwards, literaturists and rulers of Chitral princely state have put in much effort to popularize literacy, reading, and writing in Khowar. Initially, Mirza Muhammad Shakur and Prince Tajumal Shah Mohfi adopted Persian alphabet, used in neighbouring Afghanistan. However, Persian alphabet did not have letters for many unique sounds in Khowar. By the early 20th century, as under British Colonial rule, Urdu education and literacy became ever more popular among Indian Muslims (see Hindi–Urdu controversy), Chitrali literaturists, namely Sir Nasir ul-Mulk and Mirza Muhammad Ghafran saw Urdu script as a better fit for Khowar. Nonetheless, Urdu also lacked sounds that existed in Chitrali. Thus, new letters were proposed and created. But the process of settling on a standard Khowar script continued for decades into the 1970s. This process was not without controversy either. Some literaturists were advocating for keeping the number of letters to a minimum, or in other words removing Arabic letters that do not represent distinct sounds in Khowar and are homophone with other letters (for example ث، ذ، ص‎, being homophone with س، ز، س‎ respectively). In total, 6 new letters were added to the 37-letter Urdu Alphabet, to create the 43-letter Khowar script.