Kashmiri language

For other uses, see Kashmiri (disambiguation)

Kashmiri (Kashmiri: कॉशुर, کٲشُر; Hindustani: कश्मीरी کشمیری) is a Dardic language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated wholly in the Indian Jammu and Kashmir state. It has about 4,611,000 speakers. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the 23 officially recognised languages of India.

It is a V2 word order language. 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. Currently, Kashmiri is written in either the Perso-Arabic script (with some modifications) or the Devanagari script. The earliest literary composition in Kashmiri that has survived is the poetry of Lalleshvari, a 14th century mystic poetess.

Literacy in Kashmiri is continuously neglected due to various political reasons and lack of formal education in it. It is now mostly relevant in its spoken form, and the speakers of this language are also decreasing in number. Note that the primary official language of the state of Jammu and Kashmir is not Kashmiri, but Urdu. In the past few decades, Kashmiri was introduced as a subject at the university and the colleges of the valley. At present, attempts are on for inclusion of Kashmiri in school curriculum.

There is only one online newspaper in Kashmiri, though a number of literary magazines are published regularly.

The Kashmiri language has a rich literary heritage. It has been the language of numerous sufi and folk poets. The songs in the Kashmiri language are called gewun /gewun/ and the chorus songs are known as wonwun /wonwun/.

See also

• List of topics on the land and the people of “Jammu and Kashmir”
• Neab International Kashmiri Magazine

External links

• Grierson, George Abraham. A Dictionary of the Kashmiri Language. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1932.
• Ethnologue entry for Kashmiri
• Koshur: An Introduction to Spoken Kasmiri
• An Introduction to Spoken Kashmiri
• Basic words and phrases in Kashmiri language
• Kashmiri literary magazine
• Kashmiri online newspaper
• http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/kashmiri.index.html