Gawar-Bati language facts for kids

Gawar-Bati is known in Chitral as Aranduyiwar, because it is spoken in Village Arandu, which is the last village in the bottom of Chitral and is across the Kunar River from Berkot in Afghanistan. Chitral keeps a military base in Arandu to guard against an attack by Afghanistan.

There are 9,000 speakers of Gawar-Bati, but only 1,500 are in Pakistan. The rest are in Afghanistan.

The Gawar-Bati Language has not been given study by serious linguists, except that it is mentioned by George Morgenstierne (1926) and Kendall Decker (1992). It is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one.

The Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote that Chitral is the area of the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Although Khowar is the predominant language of Chitral, more than ten other languages are spoken here. These include Kalasha-mun, Palula, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gujar, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persian and Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu or Persian.