Hindko language
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Hindko (or Hindku) is an ancient language spoken in northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. The word "Hindko" literally translates to "Indian Mountains." or more appropraitely as "Mountains of the Indus country." The word "Hind" is the Persianized reference to the regions associated with the Indus River immediately to the east of Persia and "Ko" means mountains. The term is also found in the Greek reference to the mountainous region in eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan as Caucasus Indicus. The language is spoken in the areas of the North West Frontier Province (including Hazara), Punjab and Kashmir by an estimated 7 million people.
There is no generic name for these people because they belong to diverse ethnicities and tend to recongise themselves by the larger family or castes. However the laregest group of them in districts Haripur, Abbottabad and Mansehra are sometimes recongnised collectively as Hazarawal, named after the defunct Hazara Division that comprised of these districts. In Peshawar city they are referred to as "Kharay" meaning City-dwellers or Hindkowans.
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[edit] History and Origin
During the pre-Buddhist era in what is today Pakistan, the language of the masses was refined by the ancient grammarian Panini who set the rules of a structurally rigorous language called Sanskrit which was used principally for scriptures (analogous to Latin in the Western world). Meanwhile, the vernacular language of the masses, Prakrit developed into many tongues and dialects which spread over the northern parts of South Asia. Hindko is believed to be closely related to Prakrit. Due to the geographic isolation of the regions, it has undergone very little corruption, but has borrowed considerable vocabulary from its neighbors, in particular Pashto. It shows close affinity to Punjabi and the Lahnda sub-group of Indo-Aryan tongues and can be sub-divided into a northern and southern dialect (the southern dialect spoken in Pakistani Punjab shows some similarity with Siraiki as opposed to Punjabi). This language is very similar to the Mirpuri dialect of potohari and both Hindko and Mirpuri speakers can understand each other very well.
[edit] Who Speaks Hindko?
The largest geographically contiguous group of Hindko speakers is concentrated in the districts of Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra and Kaghan valley of Pakistan, while there are substantial number of geographically isolated speakers of Hindko in cities like Peshawar and Kohat. People here tend to associate themselves with larger families instead of a language (or caste as it used to be called) like Awan, Tanoli, Jadoon, Abbassi , karlal etc. People who speak Hindko are referred to by some academics as Punjabi Pashtuns probably because of many Pashtuns tribes, for example Jadoons, Swatis and Tanolis who settled in places like Hazara, adopted Hindko as their first language and had gained political power in these areas during the British rule and also because of many ethnic Pushtun people who speak Hinkdo as their first language in Peshawar and Kohat. Similarly, the Yousafzai Pashtun tribe of Mardan prefer to speak Hindko as opposed to Pashto. The Hindko speaking people living in major cities Peshawar, Kohat, Mardan are bilingual in Pashto and Hindko. Similarly many Pashto speaking people in districts like Battagram and Mansehra especially in Agror Valley and northern Tanawal (Shergarh), have become bilingual in Pashto and Hindko. The NWFP Imperial Gazetteer (1905) regularly refers to the language as Hindko. More than one interpretation has been offered for the term Hindko. Some associate it with Hindustan (as the word maybe used during the medeival muslim period in the sub-continent), others with the Hindu people, and still others with the Indus River, which is of course the etymological source of all these terms. Long before independence Grierson, in the Linguistic Survey of India, employed the term Hindko to mean "the language of Hindus" (viii, 1:34). Farigh Bukhari and South Asian language expert and historian Christopher Shackle believe that Hindko was a generic term applied to the Indo-Aryan dialect continuum in the northwest frontier territories and adjacent district of Attock in the Punjab province to differentiate it in function and form from Pashto. Linguists classify the language into the Indic subgroup of Indo-European languages and consider it to be one of the Indo-Iranian languages of the area. An estimated 2.4 per cent of the total population of Pakistan speak Hindko as their mother tongue, with more rural than urban households reporting Hindko as their household language.
[edit] Demographics
The speakers of Hindko live primarily in six districts: Mansehra, Abbottabad, Haripur, Peshawar, Nowshera and Kohat in NWFP, and Attock and Rawalpindi in Punjab and parts of Kashmir; Jonathan Addleton states that "Hindko is the most significant linguistic minority in the NWFP, represented in nearly one-fifth of the province's total households." In Abbottabad District 92 per cent of households reported speaking Hindko, in Mansehra District 47 per cent, in Peshawar District 7 per cent, and in Kohat District 10 per cent (1986). Testing of inherent intelligibility among Hindko dialects through the use of recorded tests has shown that there is a northern (Hazara) dialect group and a southern group. The southern dialects are more widely understood throughout the dialect network than are the northern dialects. The dialects of rural Peshawar and Talagang are the most widely understood of the dialects tested. The dialect of Balakot is the least widely understood.
In most Hindko-speaking areas, speakers of Pashto live in the same or neighbouring communities (although this is less true in Abbottabad and Kaghan Valley than elsewhere). In the mixed areas, many people speak both languages. The relationship between Hindko and Pashto is not one of stable bilingualism. In the northeast, Hindko is the dominant language both in terms of domain of usage and in terms of the number of speakers, whereas in the southwest, Pashto seems to be advancing in those same areas.
Historically, there were two languages each in upper Afghanistan and lower Afghanistan: Persian and Pushto and Hindko and Pushto. Chach Hazara was a great centre of resistance to the British.
The Gandhara Hindko Board has published the first dictionary of the language and its launching ceremony was held on March 16, 2003. According to a press release, Sultan Sakoon, a prominent Hindku poet, has compiled the dictionary.
[edit] References
- 1980: "Hindko in Kohat and Peshawar." Bulletin of SOAS, 1980, 482-510
- 1978: "Rival linguistic identities in Pakistan Panjab." Rule, protest, identity: aspects of modern South Asia (ed. P. Robb & D. Taylor), 213-34. London: Curzon
- 1986: Addleton, Jonathan S., "The Importance of Regional Languages in Pakistan," al'Mushir, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1986), pp. 55-80.
