Palula Vocabulary: 7th book of FLI Language and Culture Series

Islamabad: The Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI) has launched a new book, Palula Vocabulary, the 7th book of its Language and Culture Series.

Palula Vocabulary, penned down jointly by Henrik Liljegren, a field linguist at Stockholm University, Sweden, and Naseem Haider, a local researcher in FLI, who is himself a native speaker of Palula, is the result of linguistic research on the Palula language, the second largest language of Chitral.

The language is spoken in the lower part of Chitral district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Most people visiting the Chitral Valley have heard about the Kalasha people. They are probably also aware that the majority of Chitralis speak Khowar. Fewer people know that there are at least ten other languages used by various communities in the valley, each with its own distinct history and traditions. read more

The Ormuri Language in Past and Present

SDPI-FLI Press Release
Sunday, 20th Nov 2011
Islamabad

The official presentation of the book ‘The Ormuri Language in Past and Present’, jointly organized by Forum for Language Initiatives, Islamabad and Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) at the SDPI office on Sunday 20th November, 2011. The book is translated from Russian to English and is written on century’s old ‘Ormuri’ language, which is now on verge of extinction. Dr. Joan L.G. Baart, translator of the book, Dr. Henrik Liljegren, Research Consultant, FLI and Rozi Khan Burki, native speaker and expert on Ormuri language spoke at event while Distinguished National Professor and renowned author and linguist Dr. Tariq Rahman chaired the proceedings. Large number of people, academics as well as native speakers of Ormuri attended the event. Dr. Joan presented the first official copy of the book to Ormuri community representative Rozi Khan Burki. Read more

Palula Vocabulary

By Dr. Henrik Liljegren and Naseem Haider

Palula is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Chitral District in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. The main purpose of the present volume is to provide a complement to “Towards a grammatical description of Palula” (Liljegren 2008). The lexical entries presented in the present work are limited to those items that are cited or exemplified in the aforementioned work. Read more

The Ormuri Language in Past and Present

By V. A. Efimov (late)

Translated and edited by Dr. Joan L.G. Baart

Ormuri is the language of a small Indo-Iranian community, part of which lives in Logar province in Afghanistan, while the other part has its home in Pakistan, in South Waziristan in the area of Kanigram. The language has, amazingly, persisted over many centuries in the face of pressure from the surrounding predominant Persian and Pashto languages. Nowadays, however, it is on the verge of extinction in Afghanistan (where only a few members of the older generations are able to speak it), while it is still alive but seriously endangered in Pakistan. Read more

Language Shift in Northern Pakistan
The Case of Domaakí and Pashto

By Matthias Weinreich

With more than two dozen languages spoken as mother tongues by communities permanently living in its territory, Northern Pakistan is endowed with an extraordinary linguistic diversity.2 As none of the area's speech communities is permanently isolated from its neighbours, many, if not all of them, are affected by language shift. Read more

Where have all the verbs gone? On verb stretching and semi-words in Indo-Aryan Palula

By Dr. Liljegren, Henrik. 2010. Himalayan Linguistics 9(1): 51-79

Liljegren's article in the web-based journal Himalayan Linguistics discusses and analyzes a type of complex predicates that is commonly occurring in Palula (Chitral Valley) and in other languages in the region. The construction is related to the verb lexicon at large, areal phenomena, argument structure, and analogy formation. Read more