Name: Indo-Âryan, designating one of the Indo-Âryan languages or a speaker thereof. The Indo-Âryan languages constitute the largest sub-group of the Indo-Iranian (Âryan) group of Indo-European languages.

Other Names: for the region covered on this website, Kohistâni (from Persian kôhestâni 'highlander') and Dard or Dardic (from Sanskrit darʹad- 'a people adjoining Kashmir'), a name extended by Western scholars (without linguistic justification¹) from its original designation for inhabitants of Indus Kohistân to include all the Indo-Âryan groups covered here. It is not used in the modern languages of the region.

Location: Indo-Âryan speakers extend from the southern slopes of the Hindu-Kush mountains in northeastern Afghânistân through Pâkistân, India, and Nepâl to Bangaladesh in the east and to Sri Lankâ in the south, and as émigrés in communities outside of this area. The purview of this website covers the northwesternmost Indo-Âryan linguistic communities that occupy the higher watersheds of the Panjshir, Tagâw, Laghmân, Kunar-Chitral, Panjkora, Swat, and Indus Rivers in Afghânistân and Pâkistân.

Population: perhaps around 1,000,000 for all ethnic groups in the region delimited above.

Languages and Ethnic Groups: The Indo-Âryan languages of the region fall into groups based primarily on their geographic locations (native names appear in italics):²

• The Pashaʹî dialects are found in the three major tributary systems of the western Kâbul River basin: the Panjshir (along with the parallel Tagâw), the Laghmân-Alishang-Alingar, and the Kunar. These often mutually unintelligible dialects fall into a Western group and an Eastern group, divided roughly by the Laghmân-Alingar River.
  • Within the Western group there is a Tagâw subgroup centered around the upper Tagâw basin. The remaining dialects of the Western group (pašaʹî proper) constitute a dialect group with two subdialect groups. One subdialect centers on the middle Panjshir and its tributary Pachaghân Valley; the other subdialect, called kurmaitʹo, centers on the middle Alishang, spilling over into the upper Uzbin Valley to the southwest and into the west side of the upper Alingar Basin to the east.
  • Within the Eastern group two dialects, Čalâsi–Kuṛangali and Čugani stand together to form a Northeastern group, as against the rest of the dialects of the Eastern Group. In Laghmân there may still be pockets of Laghmâni in lower Laghmân. Up the Alishang on the east the šinganʹik (damʹenč) inhabit the Kulmân Valley, and the sum inhabit the Sâw and Nuralâm Valleys and the area around Ebalâm, across the Alishang. Both of these ethnic groups spill over the eastern watershed into settlements in the upper Dara-e Nur Valley. Further up the Alishang the people of the towns of Malil and Mašpa, in a single eastern side valley, constitute another ethnic group. Each of these ethnic groups has its own dialect. On the east side of the Kunar are the dialects of Upper and Lower Dara-e Nur, and degânʹo, spoken by the degʹân people in pockets on the lower Kunar River.
• The Pech Valley languages include gawâr-bâti, Šumâšti, and gʹõgali (Gṛangali). Today only gʹõgali remains in the Pech Basin, in the Digal Valley. This language was until recently also spoken in Nungalâm, at the confluence of the Pech and Waigal Valleys. Šumâšti apparently was displaced over the Pech-Kunar watershed (probably by Afghâns) to its present enclave in the village of Šumâšt in the upper Mazâr Valley, and the ancestors of today's Väi Nuristânis forced the Gawâr-bâti speakers out of their earlier home in Waigal to the Sindân region of the Kunar Valley, where they remain today.
• Kaṭâr-kalâʹi is spoken in the village of Kaṭâr-kalâ in the lower Tregâm Valley, off the lower Pech. A similar dialect, Woṭapuri, was spoken until some fifty years ago in the village of Woṭapur at the confluence of the Pech and the Tregâm Valleys. These stand perhaps as the last representatives of an earlier dialect group that may have extended from the confluence of the Pech and Kunar Rivers up into the Tregâm Valley in Pech and up to Nišagâm in the Kunar Valley.
• The Chitral languages include kalʹaṣa-mʹund/mʹandr and khowàr. The former is spoken by the kalʹaṣa peoples in side valleys of the Chitral (Kunar) River in southern Chitral District of Pâkistân. A dialect division splits the kalʹaṣa-mʹund speakers of the Bumboret and Rumbur Valleys from the kalʹaṣa-mʹandr speakers of Urtsun and other enclaves in southern Chitral. khowàr is the language of the khów people who dominate Chitral District today. Minor dialectal innovations distinguish the Khowàr spoken in southern Chitral from the more conservative speech of the north.
• Tirâhi, by now perhaps defunct, is or was spoken in a few villages southeast of Jalâlâbâd in eastern Afghânistân and in the Tirâh region south of Peshawar, Pâkistan. It may represent the last remnant of the Indo-Âryan language spoken around the Peshawar region before the arrival of the Afghâns.
• The Kohistâni languages of Dir, Swat, and Indus Kohistân Districts in Pâkistân fall into a Western and an Eastern group.
  • The Western group includes Dir Kohistâni, spoken in the upper reaches of the Panjkora basin and across the watershed into the uppermost valleys of Swat, where it is called garvʹi. A distinct dialect of this language is spoken in the village of Patrak, on the Panjkora. Perhaps also belonging in the Western group is dåmia-båṣa (Dameli), spoken in the small Dameḷ Valley in southern Chitral. Morgenstierne (1942: 147) was unsure whether to classify this language as Nuristâni or Indo-Âryan, but the laryngeal processes of this language, including aspiration, tones, and basic laryngeal posture, are characteristically Indo-Âryan, not Nuristâni. It is undoubtedly Indo-Âryan in origin, with a layer of Nuristâni vocabulary.
  • The Eastern group encompasses languages spoken in Indus Kohistân and upper Swat. Indus Kohistâni ("Maiyâ˜", a name unknown to modern speakers of the language) is the major language of this group, spoken in two dialects on the west side of the Indus: that of the Duber and Kandia Valleys, and that of Paṭan on the Indus, with the outlying subdialect kanyawâli spoken in a small enclave in the Tangîr Valley to the north. On the east side of the Indus are bhaṭʹe-sa zib, spoken in Bhaṭʹera, and Chiliso and Gowro, spoken in small enclaves to the north of Bhaṭʹera in the Shinâ'-speaking region of Indus Kohistân. Finally, torwâli is spoken in upper Swat between the Pashto- and Garvʹi-speaking regions.
• Shina (Ṣiṇâ') is spoken in several dialects in the Indus Basin from Indus Kohistân to Ladakh. The dialect around Chilâs in the east-west portion of the Indus valley above Indus Kohistân is probably the source of the speech that spread upstream along the Indus basin to form the Eastern Shina dialects and downstream to form the kohistyõ dialect of Indus Kohistan. Another dialect centers on Gilgit, with an outlying Tibetanized offshoot (Brokskat) in Ladakh. In addition there are dispersed dialect enclaves to the west of the Indus: ušuǰʹu, spoken beside Torwâli in the Chail Valley of upper Swat, the archaic dialects palôlâ' and Sâwi, spoken in enclaves off the Kunar-Chitral River, and perhaps Kalkoṭi, spoken in one part of Kalkoṭ in Dir Kohistân.
• Beyond the purview of this site is Kashmiri, traditionally counted as a "Dardic" language, along with its regional dialects Kashtawâṛi and Poguli.
• The remainder of the Indo-Aryan languages are located to the east and south. Included in these are Hindko and Gujuri, which appear on the linguistic map.

Linguistic Position of the Indo-Âryan Languages: Within the Indo-European linguistic family the Indo-Âryan languages constitute the major sub-group of the Indo-Iranian (Âryan) group, alongside the Iranian and Nuristâni sub-groups. The Indo-Âryas conserved the glottal accentual process of "aspiration", which produces an accompanying acoustic noise on a consonant, while aspiration was lost in the other Indo-Iranian sub-groups. Tendencies of long-term Indo-Âryan phonological development include the spreading of the backed-tongue position of r ("retroflexion") to adjacent consonants and the abrupt releasing of syllable onsets, producing open syllables with single-consonant syllable onsets.

History: Recent and current archaeological research substantiates that around the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. equestrian tribesmen bearing the Indo-Âryan branch of the early Âryan culture spread south over the Caucasus from their homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas, to engulf much of the Middle East from Syria to the Iranian Plateau. As the region desiccated, these Indo-Âryas spread east, via Fârs and Seistân into Baluchistân and Sindh toward the south and into Margiana and Bactria toward the north (Sarianidi 1999). Via a central route some Indo-Âryas followed the Helmand basin and crossed the watershed into the Kâbul River basin, reaching Swat as early as 1800 B.C. Pressing onward, southern waves of Indo-Âryas drove toward the Deccan and at some point became maritime, reaching Sri Lankâ and the Maldives, while central waves pushed into the Panjâb and across northern India as far as Bengal and Assam.

By the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. the northern Indo-Âryas of Margiana and Bactria were overwhelmed by Âryas of the Irânian branch of the early Âryan culture, who arrived via the Âmu Daryâ from their probable homelands north of the Indo-Âryas, on the lower Volga and adjacent regions of the northern coast of the Caspian Sea. These early Irânians from the north eventually submerged all the Indo-Âryas to the west of the longitude of central Afghanistân, and their descendants spread east throughout the region from the Hindu-Kush Range in the north to the Makrân Coast in the south, right up to the Indus Valley.

The modern Indo-Âryan speakers of the region treated here are the westernmost surviving Indo-Âryan communities. They derive from the earliest waves of Indo-Âryas who settled the alluvial flatlands of the Kâbul River basin. In the absence of historical and archaeological records from the region, we rely on comparative linguistic data to sketch the early spread of these peoples. The common linguistic heritage of the region's Indo-Âryan languages descends from the Old Indo-Âryan speech of the early Indo-Âryas. In time their language differentiated into clusters of regional dialects along the major tributaries of the Kâbul and further, up the Indus. Beyond some general changes of the Middle Indo-Âryan period, no single linguistic feature has united these regional dialects into a common group; and they have remained beyond many of the later linguistic innovations that radiated out of the Indian Midlands toward the northwest (see note 1). During the past millennium, the region's ancient lowland Indo-Âryan tongues have been overwhelmed by the Pashto of invading Afghâns, while the Indo-Âryan languages of the highlands have survived. The Afghân expansion into Dir and Swat in the 15th and 16th centuries A.D. forced the speakers of today's Kohistâni languages into their present communities in the highlands of the Dir, Swat, and Indus Kohistâns.

Pashto continues to displace Indo-Âryan and Nuristâni speech in the bottom lands of the Laghmân, Kâbul, and Indus Basins. The displacement process derives largely from marriage alliances that indigenous men form with Pashto speakers. A native man's Pashto-speaking wife rarely learns his language, largely because of the general chauvinistic attitude of Pashto speakers, and his children grow up speaking Pashto as their primary ("mother") language.

Notes