User:IqraSajjad1/Torwali Language



Torwali is a Dardic language of the Northwestern Indo-Aryan family spoken by 80,000 - 110,000 people in the Bahrain and Chail areas of the Swat District in Northern Pakistan. It is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim Dardic communities of Pakistan. It has two dialects, Bahrain and Chail. The language and its community, like other communities, Gawri in Swat and in Dir, and the ones in Indus Kohistan, is often referred to as "Kohistani" which is a name given by the Swat Pashtuns. Fredrik Barth says "By the Swat Pashtuns, the people are known as Kohistanis, together with the other non-Pashtun peoples given that name; together with the Torwalis, Kohistanis of Swat Kohistan". The Afghans call them 'Kohistani'--a name everywhere given by Pashtuns to 'the Musulmans of Indic descent living' in Hindu Kush. Torwalik, like other Dardic communities, are unaware of their origins due to invasions by outsiders. Thus, most of them today identify themselves with either Arabs or Pashtuns. Additionally, the language lacked a writing system until 2007 when it adapted a Perso-Arabic script. Close to 30-35% of its speakers have migrated permanently to the bigger cities of Pakistan where their language is either being replaced by the national language Urdu, or by other languages of wider communication such as Pashto or Punjabi. The language Torwali is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim Dardic communities of Swat.

Torwali is an endangered language: it is characterized as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of Endangered Languages, and as "vulnerable" by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. Its endangerment is due to various reasons such as " political organization, marred identities, no written tradition, and marginalization, globalization, the rule of dominant languages over these languages, rough terrain, poverty and so forth". 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).

Classification
Torwali is classified as a Dardic language of Indo-Aryan family. It is commonly referred to as a Kohistani, meaning “land of mountains”, language by non-Kohistani speakers. Due to this, Torwali speakers usually refer to their language using this general term as well unless they are distinguishing it from other Kohistani languages.

History
Torwali is believed to have originated from the pre-Muslim Dardic communities of Swat. Over the course of several invasions by outsiders, the Torwali speaking community, like other Dardic communities, have forgotten about their origin. As a result, they relate themselves to surrounding more dominating communities such as the Arabs. There are many myths about their origins and history due to no credible research having been done on them.

Even though currently they are a minority group, their larger population size compared to other Dardic communities indicates that they used to occupy an extensive area. This could mean that Torwali was a major language in Swat at some point. But in the present, many Torwali speaking families are shifting to more dominant languages, such as Urdu, as they move to bigger cities due to economic pressure.

Geographic distribution
Torwali is spoken by around 80,000 - 110,000 people in the valleys of the Swat district, which is located in northern Pakistan. The community occupies Swat’s main valley which stretches from Araneh to Chiroleh as well as a portion of Chahil Durrah. In this area, there are nine villages including Chahil, Branihal, and Ramet. In this mountainous region, many of the Torwalik’s sister communities are present as well. But they are unable to connect, even though they have many commonalities, due to being scattered across valleys.

The Torwalik population is spreading out instead of remaining in their current location for two reasons. About a third of the population has migrated to different parts of the country for economic stability. Additionally, they keep moving north due to pressure from the south. Thus, the geographical location of the community is rapidly changing.

Official status
In Pakistan, there is a lack of national policy for languages thus lesser-know languages, such as Torwali, are not recognized. Since it is difficult to convince policy makers to give recognition to these languages, their educational and cultural merit is belittled. They are not used for education or mass media. Often, only foreigners take interest in exploring and understanding them (source 5). This has resulted in Torwali and other smaller languages being seen as inferior by both the speaking community and outsiders. Thus, due to the lack of status given to Torwali, there is no prestige in speaking it.

Dialects/Varieties
Torwali has two dialects: Bahrain and Chail. The Bahrain dialect, which is the bigger one, is spoken from Madyan to the village of Asret following the Swat River. Additionally, it is spoken up the Daral river towards the Pashto-speaking territory. On the other hand, the Chail dialect is used by people in the Chail valley. It is spoken mainly in two villages located east of Madyan. Even though they are spoken in different locations, a survey done on these dialects shows that they are 89% similar.

Derived languages
Torwali, which belongs to the Kohistani sub-group of Indo-Aryanian languages, has many close relatives such as Kalami, Ushojo, Indus Kohistani, Bateri, Chilisso, Khowar, Palula, Kalash, Shina, and Kashmiri. These languages are scattered throughout Pakistan and cannot all be found in one place.

Sounds/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.

Grammar
Cases: According to Grierson, there are 8 cases which are nominative, accusative, agentive, instrumental, dative, ablative,genitive, and locative. Although Lunsford argues that there are only three which are nominative (which is unmarked), ergative and oblique.

Tenses and Aspects: Torwali consists of three tenses such as past, present, and future. It, also, has three aspects: perfective, imperfective, and inceptive (used to indicate an event about to take place).

Genders: Torwali consists of only two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine.

Nouns: In Torwali, nouns can be used as the subject or object of a sentence. Proper nouns are not made distinguishable from common nouns since they normally do not have additional modifiers such as determiners and quantifiers. Although, if the speaker is trying to emphasize something, the proper nouns do carry a modifier. On the other hand, count and mass nouns can be distinguished. Count nouns, which are nouns that can become plural, make up most of the nouns in the language. These nouns require another noun to be added in order to specify the quantity (examples found in the table below). Additionally, nouns are grammatically gendered based on biological gender wherever it is applicable (examples shown in the table below). Verbs: Torwali consists of finite and non-finite verbs. Finite verbs, which have inflection in order to mark tense, aspect, and mood, consist of simple perfective (preterite), present perfective, past perfective, imperfect, and inceptive.The non-finite verbs, which are marked by different suffixes, include infinitives, perfective adverbial participles, perfective adjectival participles, and imperfective adverbial participles.

Adverbs:  In Torwali, adverbs are used to modify verbs, adjectives and clauses. There are some limitations on their placement within a sentence. Additionally, they function to indicate information such as manner, time, degree, and direction (examples can be seen in the table below). Adjectives  - Adjectives, which are used to modify nouns, have to agree with the head noun’s grammatical gender. Also, they do not have any case or number feature. Some examples can be seen in the chart below. Numerals- The Torwali number system is a base-20 system so numbers 1-20 are all different from each other. Hence, it cycles on every 20. The table below shows Torwali numbers.

Morphology
In Torwali, the words either contain one morpheme or two/three morphemes combined. There are hardly any words in the language that contain more than three morphemes since Torwali is restrictive in the amount of morphemes that can be combined. The table below shows words composed of two morphemes. Additionally, Torwali is a fusional language meaning it has morphemes containing several meanings. For example, in bənədu, which means “he goes”, the -u specifies both the gender and number. Thus, the gender and number cannot be isolated from each other. Also, since Torwali is a fusional language, the stem forms are altered using various morphological processes such as  stem modification, suprasegmental modification, and reduplication.

Torwali relies solely on suffixes to alter words since there are no prefixes in the language. This can be seen by breaking down the structure of different word classes. In nouns, a plural suffix and oblique case marker can be joined with the stem if needed. In finite verbs, the stem may be followed by an aspect marker, agreement marker, tense/mood marker, and another agreement marker. In non-finite verbs, the stem is followed by a suffix. Thus, prefixes are not used in this language since nothing is ever added before the stem.

In order to create compound words, nouns and adjectives can be combined with other nouns. This can be seen when the words kişən, meaning “black”,  and kak, meaning “crow”, combine together to form a compound word which translates to “jet-black”

Syntax
Generally, Torwali follows a subject-object-verb word order like most Indo-Aryan languages. But unlike the positioning of the verb, the subject and object change positions sometimes. The subject may come after the object when the speaker is trying to put an emphasis on it. Hence, the position next to the verb works as a focus position.

Vocabulary/Lexis
As the Torwali population’s interaction with outside communities, such as the Pashtun, grew, many Torwali words started getting replaced by the words of other languages. Thus, there are many people from the Torwali speaking community that mix words from other languages when speaking Torwali. .

Writing system
Torwali did not have a writing tradition until around 2007. This meant that the language was only spoken orally among the speaking community which made it vulnerable to extinction. In 2005, the Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT) organization with the help of Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Forum for Language Initiative (FLI) started to work on creating an orthography for the language. The alphabets in this orthography were based on Perso-Arabic script since many Torwaliks would be familiar with it. The national language, regional language, and language of the Holy Quran all used this script making the Torwali people accustomed to it. The Torwali alphabets were composed of 47 letters of which four did not exist in urdu. Those four new letters were modified Perso-Arabic characters to represent new constants and a vowel. Out of four of these new letters, two were also used in some dialects of Pasho. The unique letter ( أ، ڇ، ڙ، ݜ) were composed of 3 consonants, [ʂ],[ʐ],[ç], and 1 vowel, [æ]. As a result of developing this orthography, the situation for Torwali had become better.

Examples
An example of ʑo (a common form of poetry) :

æ mhi theyē sūāl thū othɘl khɘn si borā

ek yæri mi dɘlāl nɘgɘş dūi ʑo nɘsɘā

Translation: I implore you my beautiful beetle of the high mountain [beloved]

One, do not employ a middle man in love affair; two, don’t make ʑo (lyrics)

An example of “Phal” (a common form of poetry) :

Yæ orān ʑéndé wālū nil gɘyā

ʑād si pæl wɘyi mhi mé būgæwā

Translation:Like the Oraan flushed down green foliage

A stream of blood ran down my chest

Additional words :


 * hédæn’ (pitcher made of mud when it is lid with tightly with animal hide or some string cloth)
 * béʃél (flute)
 * Sūrni (a type of traditional pipe)
 * ɖhūmān (drum)
 * Hilâ (air)
 * Dé (beard)
 * Po (boy)
 * Teyis (charm)
 * Hikoo (courage)
 * Book (blunt)

Categories
If there are reliable sources about when the language was first attested, consider adding the page to the relevant Category:Languages by time subcategory. If the language is extinct and there are reliable sources about when the language went extinct, consider adding the page to the relevant Category:Extinct languages by time.

Category:Dardic languages Category:Languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa