Pangwali

Pangwali (Takri: 𑚞𑚫𑚌𑚦𑚭𑚪𑚯) is an Indo-Aryan languages. It is spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of Chamba district, and is threatened to go extinct. Pangwali is natively written in the Takri script, but Devanagari is used as well. It is very similar to the Padderi language of Padder, J&K.

The linguist George Abraham Grierson recorded Pangwali as a dialect of Chambeali in his Linguistic Survey of India. It is now regarded as a language in its own right as a part of Western Pahari, affiliated with Bhadarwahi, Padderi among others.

Pangwali has about 90% inherent intelligibility with Padderi, 24% with Mandeali, 22% with Kangri, 44% with Chambeali, and 75% with Bhadarwahi. Its lexical similarity , 27% with Kullu Pahari, and 75% with Bhadarwahi.

Pangwali exhibits a fossilized system of vowel harmony as other languages of the area (such as Kashmiri) do. The original conditioning vowels that caused harmony have often been lost, so the system is no longer productive.

Since Grierson's sketch of Pangwali, there has been only recently published a grammar of Pangwali written in Hindi by Binaya Sundar Nayak. Both are referenced in this article.

Pangwali nouns have grammatical gender, with the two genders being masculine and feminine.

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. Some speakers may even call it a dialect of Punjabi or Dogri. The language has no official status. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the language is of critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Pangwali are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially.

The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari (Himachali)' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations strive to save the language and demand it. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it and having a higher mutual intelligibility with other recognised languages like Dogri and other Western Pahari languages.

At the time of the Linguistic Survey of India, 3,701 speakers were estimated of Pangwali.

Following are the dialects of the language:

1. Killar
2. Purthi
3. Sach
4. Dharwasi

Killar, being the headquarter of the Tehsil, is the dialect which is widely understood. Sach dialect is said to be the most conservative in regards to Sanskrit.

Tubari Magazine is a recent effort to maintain the language. The magazine uses Devanagari Script. There are other publications which generally describe the language.