Pakistani Languages (Kashmiri)

Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) belongs to the Dardic languages and is spoken primarily in the Kashmir Valley, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It had about 5,554,496 speakers in India according to the Census of 2001. Most of the 105,000 speakers or so in Pakistan are mostly immigrants from the Kashmir Valley and include only a few speakers residing in border villages in Neelum District. Kashmiri belongs to the geographical linguistic sub-grouping called Dardic part of the Indo-European Language Family. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages ofIndia.

Kashmiri is an official language of Jammu and Kashmir, along with Urdu, and is also one of the national languages of India. Some Kashmiri speakers use Englishor Urdu as a second language. In the past few decades, Kashmiri was introduced as a subject in the universities and the colleges of the valley. It has now been made a compulsory subject in all the schools of Jammu and Kashmir.. Though Kashmiri is a Dardic (Indo-Aryan language) it has picked up many Arabic words after Islam made inroads in this area.

Kashmiri is rich in Persian words.

Literature:

In 1919 George Abraham Grierson wrote that “Kashmiri is the only one of theDardic languages that has a literature”. Kashmiri literature dates back to over 750 years, this is, more-or-less, the age of many a modern literature including English.

Writing system:

Kashmiri has remained a spoken language up to the present times, though some manuscripts were written in the past in the Sharada script, and then in Perso-Arabic script. Kashmiri is written almost entirely in the Perso-Arabic script (with some modifications), while Kashmiri Hindu communities are attempting to promote a script based upon Devanagari script, especially on the internet - though such efforts have been almost exclusively amongst Hindus, with little to no impact on the wider Kashmiri Muslim community. Among Kashmiri speakers outside of Kashmir, Muslims tend to write in either Urdu, or in Kashmiri using the Urdu script. The smaller Kashmiri Hindu community tends to use Hindi and the Devanagari script in the same manner. Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is one of the very few which regularly indicates all vowel sounds.