ASSIGNMENT#1

ENDANGERED LANGUAGE OF PAKISTAN

SUBMITTED BY:MADEEHA FARUQI

DAMELI LANGUAGE:

Introduction:

In the southwest of the Chitral district in northern Pakistan, just near the border with Afghanistan, a river-carved valley stretches through the mountains of the Hindu Kush range. The rest of the world, to the extent that it knows about it at all, calls this valley Domel or Damel, but its own people knows it as Daman.

Population:

On the slopes of these mountains some 5 000 to 6 000 people have their homes and their villages, their fields and their pastures. There they praise and complain, laugh and lament, joke with their friends and insult their enemies, tell stupid lies and brilliant stories, ask questions and give answers, lead the prayers through the mosque loudspeakers and whisper secrets in the dark and do all the other things that words serve to do, in a language that has been different from any other for hundreds of years.

The name of language:

The speakers call it “daamiabaaṣa” rather than “Dameli”. The word is a compound of the adjective “daamiaa”, which is the name for the people, and the word for language, “baaṣa”. The Domel Valley is known as “daaman” in Dameli. The term ‘Dameli’ is probably an exonym, most likely from the neighbouring language Khowar, but it has been used consistently in scientific literature. Although this is not the term used in the language itself, it seems to be relatively accepted as a term in Urdu, English and other languages, and when the Dameli speak these languages themselves, they use this term, although some have indicated that they would rather see some variant of the Dameli term used instead.

Genealogical classification :

The linguistic heritage of Dameli is a combination of the well known and the mysterious. On the one hand, Dameli is clearly a part of the IndoEuropean family, the largest (in terms of languages, at least) and most exhaustively described of the world’s language families, and both the grammar and the lexicon give abundant evidence of this heritage. On the other hand, it is very difficult to pinpoint the exact position of Dameli within this family and to ascertain its closest relatives within it. Within the Indo-European family, there are two nodes that may be relevant for Dameli: the Nuristani family and the “Dardic” group.

Geographic location:

Dameli is spoken in the Domel Valley, a side-valley of the Kunar Valley, which leads from Chitral over the border to Afghanistan.

The dameli people:

 The speakers of Dameli live mainly on agriculture and herding. Goats, sheep, cows and hens are kept, and dairy products are an important part of the diet. The main crops are wheat and maize, but a wide variety of fruits and nuts are also grown, particularly grapes and walnuts, but also pomegranates, mulberries, peaches, melons, apricots, pears, apples, figs and a number of fruits.

Dameli is still the main language in the villages where it is spoken, and is regularly learned by children. Most of the men speak Pashto as a second language, and some also speak Khowar and Urdu but there are no signs of massive language change.

The Norwegian linguist George 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, GawarBati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gujar, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persianand Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu or Persian.