Urtsuniwar
Dialect of the Chitrali Kalasha language
Urtsuniwar or Urchuniwar (اُرچؕنوار) is a dialect of the Kalasha-mun spoken in the Urtsun Valley of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The total number of speakers is estimated to be around 2,900-5,700 peoples.
01Similarity
It has been debated whether Urtsuniwar is a distinct language or a dialect of Kalasha-mun. Urtsuniwar and Kalasha-mun exhibit 70% mutual intelligibility. Urtsuniwar also shares some similarities with the Ushojo.
02History
The Kafirs of Urtsun were among the last pagans in Afghanistan and Pakistan to convert to Islam in the mid-1900s. The last Urtsun Kafir was Mranzi, who had married a Kalasha from the Biriu valley and moved out of the valley in 1940, just as the conversion to Islam was completed. They renamed their language from Kalasha-mun to Urtsuniwar and later borrowed heavily from the Khowar, changing their identity. Subsequently, Urtsuniwar started to diverge into a distinct dialect of Kalasha-mun.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Urtsuniwar”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Urtsuniwar.png by Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0
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