Kashmiri Series: A Primer And A Reader With Annotated Bibliography

THE KASHMIRI LANGUAGE 1 The Kashmiri Language Omkar N. Koul 1. Introduction 1.1. Area and Speakers The Kashmiri language is called k?:šur or k?:šir zaba:n by its native speakers. It is primarily spoken in the Kashmir Valley of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India. According to the 1981 census there were 30,76,398 speakers of the language. The census was not conducted in the year 1991. Keeping in view the rise of the population over last many years, the current number of its speakers will be around four million. Kashmiri is also spoken by Kashmiris settled in other parts of India, and other countries. The language spoken in and around Srinagar is regarded as the standard variety. It is used in literature, mass media and education. 1.2. Classification and Dialects There is a general consensus amongst historical linguists that Kashmiri belongs to the Dardic branch of the Indo-Aryan family. Grierson (1919), Morgenstierne (1961), and Fussman (1972) classify Kashmiri under Dardic group of Indo-Aryan languages. The term Dardic is stated to be only a geographical convention and not a linguistic expression. The classification of Kashmiri and other Dardic languages, has been reviewed in some works (Kachru 1969, Strand 1973, Koul and Schmidt 1984), with different purposes in mind. Kachru points out linguistic characteristics of Kashmiri. Strand presents his observations on Kafir languages. Koul and Schmidt have reviewed the literature on the classification of Dardic languages and have investigated the linguistic characteristics or features of these languages with special reference of Kashmiri and Shina. Kashmiri is closely related to Shina and some other languages of the North-West frontier. It also shares some morphological features such as pronominal suffixes with Sindhi and Lahanda. However, Kashmiri is different from all other Indo-Aryan languages in certain phonological, morphological, and syntactic features. For example, Kashmiri has a set of central vowels /, :, ?, ?:/ which are not found in other Indo-Aryan languages. In a similar way, in Kashmiri the finite verb always occurs in the second position with the exception in relative clause constructions. The word order in Kashmiri, thus, resembles the one in German, Dutch, Icelandic, Yiddish and a few other languages. These languages form a distinct set and are currently known as Verb Second (V-2) languages. Note that the word order generated by V-2 languages is quite different from Verb middle languages, such as English. In a V-2 language, any constituent of a sentence can precede the verb. It is worth mentioning here that Kashmiri shows several unique features which are different from the above mentioned other V-2 languages. Kashmiri has two types of dialects: (a) Regional dialects and (b) Social dialects. UZ-Translations 1 2 STUDIES IN KASHMIRI Regional dialects are further of two types: (i) those regional dialects or variations which are spoken in the regions inside the valley of Kashmir and (ii) those which are spoken in the regions outside the valley of Kashmir. The Kashmiri speaking area in the valley is ethno-semantically divided into three regions: (1) Maraz (southern and south-eastern region), (2) Kamraz (northern and north-western region) and (3) Srinagar and its neighbouring areas. There are some minor linguistic variations mainl