Gowro (An Endangered language of Pakistan)
By Maria
2014-Mphil-(Eng.linguistics)-011
Other names of Gowro language
Gowro is a Dardic language of the Kohistani group spoken
in Kohistan District, Pakistan. Its status on Ethnologue is ISO
639-3. It has been classified as
Indo Iranian, indo-European and is included in the area of Northwestern zone. It
is natively spoken in Northern’s Pakistan Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. It
is also spoken in Mehrin village, Kolai area on Indus, Indus East bank on
Kohistani district. It is 20% threatened. It is an ancestral language of Gaber
Khel a clan residing family. Dialectal similarity is 65%-68% with Chilliso, 62%
with Indus Kohistan with Bateri, 40%-43% with Kohistani Shina, 25% with Torwali, 24% with Kalami. Accoding to
Unesco, the number of speakers are 200. Hallberg says that the dominance of
Shina may be slowly erasing the use of Gowro. Bart (2003) confirms that only
1000 speakers are left now and it may be dying.
This graph shows the place of Gowro within the cloud of all living languages. Each
language in the world is represented by a small dot that is placed on the grid
in relation to its population (in the vertical axis) and its level of
development or endangerment (in the horizontal axis), with the largest and
strongest languages in the upper left and the smallest and weakest languages
(down to extinction) in the lower right. The
value for the development versus endangerment dimension is the estimated level
on the EGIDS scale. Yellow dot shows that this
language is in trouble (EGIDS 6b-7) . Inter- generational transmission is in the process of being broken, but the child-bearing generation can still use the language so it is possible that revitalization efforts could restore transmission of the language in the home.
Language Family of Gowro language
No comments:
Post a Comment