Kashmiri Language

Kashmiri Language, the official language of Jammu and Kashmir State in India, with 4,391,000 (1997) mother-tongue speakers in different parts of India; the mother tongue of over half the population of Jammu and Kashmir. It is spoken mainly at the western end of the state, toward the Pakistan border; Ladakhi is spoken in the east.

Linguistically it is classified as a member of the Dardic subset in the North-western group of Indo-Aryan languages and its literature can be traced back to the 14th century. Today the Perso-Arabic script (with some extra diacritics) is the official script for Kashmiri in Jammu and Kashmir, although the question of a script for Kashmiri has been (and continues to be) a controversial one. It used to be written in the ancient Sharada script that Sanskrit came to be written in, but this was not sufficient to encompass the complex vowel system of Kashmiri. Around the time that Persian became a dominant language in the area, the Persian script began to be used for Kashmiri and has since been adapted many times in attempts to better describe the very complex Kashmiri phoneme system (see Phonetics: Phonemics). Many scripts have since been used for Kashmiri, including Devanagari and Roman: Hindu speakers of Kashmiri use the Devanagari script.

Muslim speakers of the language use a version with a strongly Arabic- and Persian-influenced vocabulary. In Pakistan, Kashmiri is a minority language, with about 105,000 speakers. Many Kashmiri speakers also speak and write in Urdu. Kashmiri is the only language in the Dardic group to have a literary tradition. Other Dardic languages have far fewer speakers.

The classification of Kashmiri and the Dardic languages within the Indo-European phylum has long been in dispute: some linguists call them “Iranian”, whereas others prefer the label “New Indo-Aryan”. Grammatical features place them somewhere between the two, and the modern Dardic languages have been so permeated with Persian and Urdu influences that classification is difficult.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.