Torwali language



Torwali is an Indo-Aryan language spoken  by the Torwali people, and concentrated in  the Bahrain and Chail areas of the Swat District in Pakistan. The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim communities of Swat. It is the closest modern Indo-Aryan language still spoken today to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language spoken in the ancient region of Gandhara.

Torwali is an endangered language: it is characterised as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of Endangered Languages, and as "vulnerable" by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. There have been efforts to revitalize the language since 2004, and mother tongue community schools have been established by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT).

Phonology
Although descriptions of Torwali phonology have appeared in the literature, some questions still remain unanswered.

Vowels
Edelman's analysis, which was based on Grierson and Morgenstierne, shows nasal counterparts to at least and also found a series of central (reduced?) vowels, transcribed as: $⟨ä⟩$, $⟨ü⟩$, $⟨ö⟩$.

Lunsford had some difficulty determining vowel phonemes and suggested there may be retracted vowels with limited distribution: (which may be ),. Retracted or retroflex vowels are also found in Kalash-mondr.

Consonants
The phonemic status of the breathy voiced series is debatable.

Sounds with particularly uncertain status are marked with a superscript question mark.

Alphabet
The Torwali language does not have a fixed orthography. The existing and widely used Torwali Character set was proposed by Inam Ullah, who proposed representations for unique sounds in Torwali language which later received official designations from the Unicode with the support of University of Chicago in 2005.