The most widely spoken among all Dardic languages,
Kashmiri is spread in the Kashmir Valley in North India and Pakistan. It
is used today by more than three and a half million of people, and was
declared the official language of the Indian Kashmir state. Numerous dialects
are spoken in rural areas of the state: the best known of them are Kashtawari,
Poguli, Siraji, Rambani.
Main phonetic features: Kashmiri divides vowels
to long and short, and back, medium and front; the system of consonants
is characterized by the 3-grade structure of aspiration (i.e. t -
th - d). Also consonants can be palatalized and labiovelar (t
- t' - tw), and moreover cerebral (t. - t.' - t.w).
The morphology is very specific with four cases
(one of them - the so called agentive case, denoting the subject with transitive
verbs). But all four of them exist only in masculine singular, while plural
nouns and feminine nouns use only three cases, without agentive. Verbs
are also distributed by three aspects (including the neutral aspect and
the resultative aspect). The sentence in Kashmiri is built ergatively.
Kashmiri is the only Dardic language which uses
its own writing system, which is very ancient. The earliest documents found
were created in the 13th century. Traditional script is the Indian Sharada
script, though nowadays most Kashmiris use the Arabic alphabet with some
diacritics for native sounds.
Dardic links
