Torwali language

Bahrain, the main town of the Torwali community

Torwali (Torwali: توروالی), also known as Bahrain Kohistani, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Torwali people, and concentrated in the Bahrain and Chail areas in the Swat Kohistan region of the Swat District in northern Pakistan. The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim communities of Swat. It is the closest modern Indo-Aryan language still spoken today to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language spoken in the ancient region of Gandhara. Torwali and Gawri languages are collectively classified as "Swat Kohistani".

The words "Kohistan" and Kohistani are generic terms. Kohistan in Persian and in Urdu means as "land of mountains" whereas "Kohistani" refers to 'language spoken in the land mountains" or 'people of the mountains. Joan Baart is the only author who used the term "Bahrain Kohistani" for the Torwali language. Ethnologue, twenty seventh edition suggests Kohistani, Torwalak, Torwalik and Turvali as alternative names for the language while Torwali as an autonym for it.

Torwali is an endangered language: it is characterised as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of Endangered Languages, and as "vulnerable" by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. There have been efforts to revitalize the language since 2004, and mother tongue community schools have been established by Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (Institute for Education and Development) (IBT).

More information about Torwali can be accessed on this website. https://ibtnorthpakistan.org/

Phonology

Although descriptions of Torwali phonology have appeared in the literature, some questions still remain unanswered.

Vowels

Edelman's analysis, which was based on Grierson and Morgenstierne, shows nasal counterparts to at least /e o a/ and also found a series of central (reduced?) vowels, transcribed as: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ü⟩, ⟨ö⟩.

Lunsford had some difficulty determining vowel phonemes and suggested there may be retracted vowels with limited distribution: /ɨ/ (which may be [i̙]), /e̙/, /ə̙/. Retracted or retroflex vowels are also found in Kalash-mondr.

Consonants

The phonemic status of the breathy voiced series is debatable.

Sounds with particularly uncertain status are marked with a superscript question mark.

Alphabet

The Torwali language does not have a fixed orthography. The existing and widely used Torwali Character set was proposed by Inam Ullah, who proposed representations for unique sounds in Torwali language which later received official designations from the Unicode with the support of University of Chicago in 2005.

The Torwali orthography was developed by Idara Baraye Taleem wa Taraqi (IBT) i.e. institute for education and development from 2005-2008 wherein text books for children were developed along with the Alphabet book and primer in Torwali under the Mother Tongue Based Multilingual Education program by the abovementioned organization.

Letters

The Torwali alphabet has 46 letters. It uses all 39 letters of the Urdu alphabet plus 7 additional letters.

There are 16 aspirated consonants in Torwali represented by digraphs with the letter ھ:
  • بھ (bh)
  • پھ (ph)
  • تھ (th)
  • ٹھ (ṭh)
  • جھ (jh)
  • چھ (čh)
  • ڇھ (c̣h, ĉh)
  • دھ (dh)
  • ڈھ (ḍ)
  • رھ (rh)
  • ڑھ (ṛh)
  • کھ (kh)
  • گھ (gh)
  • لھ (lh)
  • مھ (mh)
  • نھ (nh)
There is also another digraph, نگ, (transliterated in Latin script as ng), and it represents the sound /ŋ/.
 The letter ے is used for the /e/ sound, and can also appear at the middle of a word, unlike in Urdu where it appears only at the end of a word. The letters ځ and ݨ are used in Pashto loanwords (ݨ for Pashto ڼ), while the letters ث, ح, ذ, ز, ص, ض, ط, ظ, ع, ف and ق are only used in loanwords from Urdu, Arabic and Persian.
 Torwali also uses the letter ٲ for the /æ/ sound, at the beginning, middle or end of word, and is transliterated æ in Latin script. This letter is not part of the Alphabetical order.
 The letter ا can represent both /a/ (also represented by zabar / fatha َ) or /ə/.

References

Bibliography

An online source, the website of IBT where efforts of revitalizing the Torwali language can be found along with resources in and about the Torwali language:

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Uses material from the Wikipedia article Torwali language, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.