Nuristani languages

Nuristani
Geographic distribution	Nuristan, Afghanistan Chitral, Pakistan
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Nuristani
Proto-language	Proto-Nuristani
Subdivisions	Katë Prasun Ashkun Nuristani Kalasha Tregami Zemiaki
Language codes
Glottolog	nuri1243
Nuristan region, located on southern range of Hindu Kush
Nuristan Province in modern-day Afghanistan, where most speakers live

The Nuristani languages are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the Indo-Aryan and Iranian groups. They have approximately 214,000 speakers primarily in eastern Afghanistan and a few adjacent valleys in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Chitral District, Pakistan. The region inhabited by the Nuristanis is located in the southern Hindu Kush mountains, and is drained by the Alingar River in the west, the Pech River in the center, and the Landai Sin and Kunar rivers in the east. More broadly, the Nuristan (or Kafiristan) region is located at the northern intersection of the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau. The languages were previously often grouped with Indo-Aryan (Dardic sub-group) or Iranian until they were finally classified as forming a third branch in Indo-Iranian.

Languages

A map of Nuristani Languages by Georg Morgenstierne

• Katë (Kamkata-vari, includes the Western, Northeastern, and Southeastern dialects) 150,000 speakers
• Prasun (Vasi-vari) 8,000 speakers
• Ashkun 40,000 speakers
• Nuristani Kalasha (Waigali) 12,000 speakers
• Tregami 3,500 speakers
• Zemiaki 500 speakers

History

The prehistory of Nuristani is unclear, except that it clearly belongs to the Indo-Iranian subgroup. However, its classification within Indo-Iranian was debated until recent research settled its position as a third branch distinct from Indo-Aryan or Iranian, though extensive Indo-Aryan influence can be detected within the Nuristani languages, pointing to prolonged contact. According to Jakob Halfmann (2023), Nuristani may have had contact with Bactrian in the 1st millennium.

The Nuristani languages were not described in literature until the 19th century. The older name for the region was Kafiristan and the languages were termed Kafiri, but the terms have been replaced by the present ones since the conversion of the region to Islam in 1896. The Kalash people are very close to the Nuristani people in terms of culture and historic religion, and are divided between speakers of the Nuristani language, Nuristani Kalasha (Kalasha-ala), and an Indo-Aryan language, Kalaṣa-mun.

The languages are spoken by tribal peoples in an extremely isolated mountainous region of the Hindu Kush, one that has never been subject to any real central authority in modern times. This area is located along the northeastern border of present-day Afghanistan and adjacent portions of the northwest of present-day Pakistan. These languages have not received the attention linguists would like to give them. Considering the very small number of people estimated to speak them, they must be considered endangered languages.

Many Nuristani people now speak other languages, such as Dari and Pashto (two official languages of Afghanistan) and Khowar.

Vocabulary

The most archaic layer of Nuristani lexicon is the common inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, shared with other Indo-European languages. For example, Tregami tre is cognate with English three and Spanish tres.

The next layer is the inheritance from Proto-Indo-Iranian shared with the Indo-Iranian languages since the late 3rd millennium BCE. Nuristani-speaking peoples have made enduring social contact with Indo-Aryan speakers over the course of their developments, leading to a large number of early Indo-Aryan loanwards into Nuristani languages and relative semantic closeness among the shared cognates between Indo-Aryan and Nuristani. Early forms of Middle Iranian and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, like Gandhari or some unattested and extinct varieties of Indo-Aryan, have shared a general cultural and linguistic milieu with Nuristanis for more than two millennia, even though independent developments continued. For example, Nuristani languages may have made borrowed words from Bactrian around the 1st century CE.

Due to the relative isolation of Nuristani languages, they have retained some archaic words from the ancient Indo-Iranian religious framework, which the pre-Islamic Nuristani religion shares with the precursors of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. For example, Katë Inrë is parallel to the Hindu deity Indra, from which it derives inrõ "rainbow" (Indra-bow) and inrëṣ "earthquake" (Indra-impulse).

The most recent influx of loanwords into Nuristani is from Dari Persian and Pashto, principally in fields of government, religion, and the sciences. The co-existence of other modern-day Indo-Iranian languages like Dardic and Eastern Iranian languages in the neighboring regions of Nuristan has led to language contact and multilingualism of the present day.

The chart below compares some basic vocabulary among the Nuristani languages.

English	Prasun	Katë	Ashkun	Nuristani Kalasha	Tregami
one	upün	ew	ac̣	ew	yo
two	lü	dyu, dü	du	dü	du
three	ćši	tre	trë	tre	tre
four	čpu	štëvo, što	ćatā	čatā	čātā
five	vuču	puč	põć	pũč	põč
six	vuṣ	ṣu	ṣo	ṣu	ṣu
seven	sëtë	sut	sōt	sot	sut
eight	astë	uṣṭ	ōṣṭ	oṣṭ	voṣṭ
nine	nu	nu	no	nu	nũ
ten	lezë	duć	dos	doš	dåš
eye	ižĩ	ačẽ	aćĩ	ačẽ	ac̣ĩ
tongue	luzuk	diz	žū
gut	vu	řu	ẓo	vřu
name	nom	num	nām	nām

Proto-Nuristani

Proto-Nuristani
PNur
Reconstruction of	Nuristani languages
Era	2nd millennium BCE
Reconstructed ancestors	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-Iranian

The earliest divergence of Nuristani from the other Indo-Iranian languages may be indicated by the fact that the Ruki sound law does not apply after *u: e.g. Southeastern Katë (Kamdesh) musë /muˈsɘ/ "mouse".

Nuristani shares with Iranian the merger of the tenuis and breathy-voiced consonants, the preservation of the distinction between the two sets of Indo-Iranian voiced palatals (which merged in Indo-Aryan), and the fronting of the Proto-Indo-Iranian primary palatal consonants. The latter were retained as dental affricates in Proto-Nuristani, in contrast to simplification to sibilants (in most of Iranian) or interdentals (in Persian). Nuristani is distinguished by the lack of debuccalizing /s/ to /h/ as in Indo-Aryan. Later on /*d͡z/ shifted to /z/ in all Nuristani varieties other than Southeastern Katë and Tregami, while /*t͡s/ shifted to /s/ only in Ashkun, though some instances of /*t͡s/ in Ashkun are retained as /t͡s/ instead.

Many Nuristani languages have subject–object–verb (SOV) word order, like most of the other Indo-Iranian languages, and unlike the nearby Dardic Kashmiri language, which has verb-second word order.

See also

• Nuristani Swadesh lists
• Indo-Iranian languages
• Nuristanis
• Nuristan
• Chitral District

Bibliography

• Decker, Kendall D. (1992). Languages of Chitral. In: Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan 5. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics. ISBN 4-87187-520-2.
• Grjunberg, A. L. (1971). K dialektologii dardskich jazykov (glangali i zemiaki). Indijskaja i iranskaja filologija: Voprosy dialektologii. Moscow.
• Jakob Halfmann (2023). Lād "law": a Bactrian loanword in the Nuristani languages, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, United Kingdom.
• Morgenstierne, Georg (1926). Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9.
• Jettmar, Karl (1985). Religions of the Hindu Kush ISBN 0-85668-163-6
• Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. Thames and Hudson, 1989.
• Mallory, James P.; Adams, Douglas Q. "Indo-Iranian Languages". In: Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.
• Strand, Richard F. "NURESTÂNI LANGUAGES" in Encyclopædia Iranica
• Strand, Richard F. "- Kâmboǰâs and Sakas in the Holly-Oak Mountains.pdf"

Further reading

• Degener, Almuth (2002). "The Nuristani Languages". In Sims-Williams, Nicholas (ed.). Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples. Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 103–117.
• Fries, Simon; Halfmann, Jakob; Hill, Eugen; Hübner, Denise (2023). "From noun to future tense: The functional diachrony of the l-future in the Nuristani languages and its typological background". STUF – Language Typology and Universals. 76 (1): 53–85. doi:10.1515/stuf-2023-2002.
• Hegedűs, Irén; Blažek, Václav (2010). "On the position of Nuristani within Indo-Iranian". Paper presented at the conference Sound of Indo-European 2 (Opava, Oct 2010).
• Hegedűs, Irén (2022). "Two plant-based numeral classifiers in Nuristani languages: grain and branch". Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. 9 (1–2): 69–95. doi:10.1515/jsall-2023-1001.
• Kuz’Mina, E.E.; Mallory, J.P. (2007). "The genesis of the dards and nuristani". The Origin of the Indo-Iranians. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. pp. 307–320. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004160545.i-763.90.
• Rybatzki, V. (2013). "Vocabularies from the middle of the 20th century from Afghanistan Part one: Iranian, Nuristani and Dardic materials I.". Acta Orientalia. 66 (3): 297–348. doi:10.1556/aorient.66.2013.3.4. JSTOR 43282518.
• Rybatzki, Volker (2013). "Vocabularies from the middle of the 20th century from Afghanistan Part one: Iranian, Nuristani and Dardic materials II". Acta Orientalia. 66 (4): 443–469. doi:10.1556/aorient.66.2013.4.6. JSTOR 43282530.
• Strand, Richard F. (2022). "Ethnolinguistic and Genetic Clues to Nûristânî Origins". International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction. 19: 267–353.
• Halfmann, Jakob (2024). A Grammatical Description of the Katë Language (Nuristani) (PhD thesis). Universität zu Köln.

External links

• Reiko and Jun's Kalash Page
• Hindi/Urdu-English-Kalasha-Khowar-Nuristani-Pashtu Comparative Word List
• Richard Strand's Nuristân Site This site is the primary source on the linguistics and ethnography of Nuristân and neighboring regions, collected and analyzed over the last forty years by the leading scholar on Nuristân.