Kashmiri language

Kashmiri (English: /kæʃˈmɪəri/ kash-MEER-ee) or Koshur (Kashmiri: کٲشُر (Perso-Arabic, Official Script), pronounced [kəːʃur]) is a Dardic Indo-Aryan language spoken by around 7 million Kashmiris of the Kashmir region, primarily in the Kashmir Valley and Chenab Valley of the Indian-administrated union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, over half the population of that territory. Kashmiri has split ergativity and the unusual verb-second word order.
Since 2020, It has been made an official language of Jammu and Kashmir along with Dogri, Hindi, Urdu and English. Kashmiri is also among the 22 scheduled languages of India.
Kashmiri is spoken by roughly five percent of Pakistani-administrated Azad Kashmir's population.
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. Most Kashmiri speakers are located in the Kashmir Valley, Chenab valley and other areas of Jammu and Kashmir. In the Kashmir and Chenab Valley Kashmiri speakers form the 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 (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. At the 2017 Census of Pakistan, as many as 350,000 people declared their first language to be Kashmiri.
A process of language shift 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. 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 of Azad Kashmir 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. It was a part of the Eighth Schedule in the former constitution of 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. After Hindi, Kashmiri is the second fastest growing language of India, followed by Meitei (Manipuri) as well as Gujarati in the third place, and Bengali in the fourth place, according to the 2011 census of India.
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.
Poguli and Kishtwari are closely related to Kashmiri, which are spoken in the mountains to the south of the Kashmir Valley and have sometimes been counted as dialects of Kashmiri.
The people in the Chenab region of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir primarily speak Kashmiri but the accent and some words are a little bit different and they are sometimes referred as Chenabi Kashmiris meaning Kashmiris of Chenab Valley.
Kashmiri has the following phonemes.
The oral vowels are as follows:
The short high vowels are near-high, and the low vowels apart from /aː/ are near-low.
Nasalization is phonemic. All sixteen oral vowels have nasal counterparts.
Palatalization is phonemic. All consonants apart from those in the post-alveolar/palatal column have palatalized counterparts.
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.
There are three orthographical systems used to write the Kashmiri language: the Perso-Arabic script, the Devanagari script and the Sharada script. The Roman script is also sometimes informally used to write Kashmiri, especially online.
Today Kashmiri is primarily written in Perso-Arabic (with some modifications). Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is one of the scripts that regularly indicates all vowel sounds.
The Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script is recognized as the official script of Kashmiri language by the Jammu and Kashmir government and the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages. The Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script has been derived from Persian alphabet. The consonant inventory and their corresponding pronunciations of Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script doesn't differ from Perso-Arabic script, with the exception of the letter ژ, which is pronounced as /t͡s/ instead of /ʒ/. However, the vowel inventory of Kashmiri is significantly larger than other Perso-Arabic derived or influenced South Asian Perso-Arabic scripts. There are 17 vowels in Kashmiri, shown with diacritics, letters (alif, waw, ye), or both. In Kashmiri, the convention is that most vowel diacritics are written at all times.
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 community.
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 Pandits.
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 [ə] and elongated schwa-like vowel [əː] 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 कऺ / कऻ for the schwa-like vowel [ə] & elongated schwa-like vowel [əː] and a new stand alone vowel ॵ and vowel sign कॏ for the open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ] which can be used instead of the consonant व standing-in for this vowel.
Vowel mark
Kashmiri is a fusional language with verb-second (V2) word order. Several of Kashmiri's grammatical features distinguish it from other Indo-Aryan languages.
Kashmiri nouns are inflected according to gender, number and case. There are no articles, nor is there any grammatical distinction for definiteness, although there is some optional adverbial marking for indefinite or "generic" noun qualities.
The Kashmiri gender 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.
There are five cases in Kashmiri: nominative, dative, ergative, ablative and vocative. 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 is marked in the ergative case and the object in nominative, which is identical to how the subject of an intransitive verb 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, genitive, comitative and allative, are marked by postpositions rather than suffixation.
The following table illustrates Kashmiri noun declension according to gender, number and case.
Kashmiri verbs are declined according to tense and person, and to a lesser extent, gender. Tense, along with certain distinctions of aspect, 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.
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 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:
There are two main aspectual distinctions in Kashmiri, perfective and imperfective. Both employ a participle 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 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.
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 وۄزُل [ʋɔzul] ("red"):
Among those adjectives not declined are adjectives that end in -[lad̪] or -[ɨ], adjectives borrowed from other languages, and a few isolated irregulars.
The comparative and superlative forms of adjectives are formed with the words ژۆر [t͡sor] ("more") and سؠٹھا [sʲaʈʰaː] ("most"), respectively.
Within the Kashmir language, numerals are separated into cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers. 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.
Kashmiri is an Indo-Aryan language and was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, especially early on. After the arrival of Islamic administrative rule in India, Kashmiri acquired many Persian loanwords. In modern times, Kashmiri vocabulary has imported words from English, Hindustani and Punjabi.
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 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.
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 (aun vs me-), Gujarati (hu-n vs ma-ri), Konkani (hā̃v vs mhazo), and Braj (hau-M vs mai-M). The Iranian Pashto preserves it too (za vs. maa), as well as Nuristani languages, such as Askunu (âi vs iũ).
There are very minor differences between the Kashmiri spoken by Hindus and Muslims. For 'fire', a traditional Hindu uses the word اۆگُن [oɡun] while a Muslim more often uses the Arabic word نار [naːr].
Art. 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
سٲری اِنسان چھِ آزاد زامٕتؠ۔ وؠقار تہٕ حۆقوٗق چھِ ہِوی۔ تِمَن چھُ سوچ سَمَج عَطا کَرنہٕ آمُت تہٕ تِمَن پَزِ بٲے بَرادٔری ہٕنٛدِس جَذباتَس تَحَت اَکھ أکِس اَکار بَکار یُن ۔
[səːriː insaːn t͡ʃʰi aːzaːd zaːmɨtʲ . ʋʲaqaːr tɨ hoquːq t͡ʃʰi hiʋiː . timan t͡ʃʰu soːt͡ʃ samad͡ʒ ataː karnɨ aːmut tɨ timan pazi bəːj baraːdəriː hɨndis d͡ʒazbaːtas tahat akʰ əkis akaːr bakaːr jun]
"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."
Verses by Lalleshwari:
𑆏𑆩𑆶𑆅 𑆃𑆑𑆶𑆪 𑆃𑆗𑆶𑆫 𑆥𑆾𑆫𑆶𑆩 𑆱𑆶𑆅 𑆩𑆳𑆬𑆴 𑆫𑆾𑆛𑆶𑆩 𑆮𑆶𑆤𑇀𑆢𑆱 𑆩𑆁𑆘 𑆱𑆶𑆅 𑆩𑆳𑆬𑆴 𑆑𑆤𑆴 𑆥𑇀𑆪𑆜 𑆓𑆾𑆫𑆶𑆩 𑆠 𑆖𑆾𑆫𑆶𑆩 𑆃𑆱𑆱 𑆱𑆳𑆱 𑆠 𑆱𑆥𑆤𑇀𑆪𑆱 𑆱𑆾𑆤𑇆
[oːmuj akuj at͡ʃʰur porum, suj maːli roʈum ʋɔndas manz, suj maːli kani pʲaʈʰ gorum tɨ t͡sorum, əːsɨs saːs tɨ sapnis sɔn.]
"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."
𑆃𑆑𑆶𑆪 𑆏𑆀𑆑𑆳𑆫 𑆪𑆶𑆱 𑆤𑆳𑆨𑆴 𑆣𑆫𑆼 𑆑𑆶𑆩𑇀𑆮𑆪 𑆧𑇀𑆫𑆲𑇀𑆩𑆳𑆟𑇀𑆝𑆱 𑆪𑆶𑆱 𑆓𑆫𑆴 𑆃𑆒 𑆩𑆶𑆪 𑆩𑆁𑆠𑇀𑆫 𑆪𑆶𑆱 𑆖𑇀𑆪𑆠𑆱 𑆑𑆫𑆼 𑆠𑆱 𑆱𑆳𑆱 𑆩𑆁𑆠𑇀𑆫 𑆑𑇀𑆪𑆳 𑆑𑆫𑆼𑇆
[akuj omkaːr jus naːbi dareː, kumbeː brahmaːnɖas sum gareː, akʰ suj mantʰɨr t͡sʲatas kareː, tas saːs mantʰɨr kjaː kareː.]
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.