Gawarbati: Documentation of a linguistic community in the Hindu Kush

Language	Gawarbati
Depositor	Henrik Liljegren, Anastasia Panova
Affiliation	Stockholm University
Location	Pakistan
Collection ID	0857
Grant ID	VR-2020-01500
Funding Body	Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council)
Collection Status	Forthcoming
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/af84df9a-c4d9-4629-b7c1-95d39c19d360

 

Summary of the collection

This collection contains documentation of Gawarbati, through interviews with Gawar community members. This is the first time that Gawarbati has been comprehensively studied. Together with a few closely related varieties, spoken by small communities situated farther down the Kunar Valley (Shumashti, Ningalami and Grangali), it forms a Kunaric clade of its own within the Indo-Aryan languages of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram region. Although Gawarbati (previously often written as Gawar-Bati) is the most common name given by speakers and scholars alike, other designations reported—mainly those used by non-Gawars—are Gawari, Aranduiwar, Kohistani, and Narsati. Contrary to many equally small neighbouring groups, who are settled along smaller tributaries and in more remote higher-altitude areas and around the Kunar Valley, the Gawars inhabit the relatively fertile main valley itself, by the Kunar River. It seems likely that they have been in constant interaction with other groups throughout most of their history. Because of their location on the border between rival powers, in the middle of a thoroughfare of sorts and susceptible to new—cultural, religious or linguistic—influences, they have had to assert their own identity and defend their way of life in the midst of flux. While the documentation corpus as a whole consists of a wide variety of recorded events, the eight texts included in the present collection were purposefully chosen to represent a folktale community tradition. Most of the texts therefore reflect local anecdotes and narratives connected with the region, told in the form of monologues, often with mythical ingredients.

 

Group represented

The high mountains of the Hindu Kush and the adjacent mountainous regions is home to numerous languages and groups of people. Gawarbati /gawarbaːti/ is spoken by people referring to themselves as Gawar—Gawarbati literally meaning ‘Gawar speech.’ They live in the Kunar Valley, on both sides of the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan, mainly concentrated in Arandu, a large village—or rather cluster of settlements—in Pakistan’s Lower Chitral District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, and in Dokalam, Barikot, Nari, and Nishagam, all except the latter situated in Nari District, Kunar Province, in Afghanistan. This area is referred to as Gawarum by its inhabitants. A gradual language shift in favour of Pashto has been taking place in most of the locations situated on the Afghan side of the border in the last few decades. Only rough estimations of the total number of Gawars, or speakers of Gawarbati, are available, ranging between 10,000 and 35,000, the higher numbers likely including many heritage speakers or people identifying themselves as Gawars without necessarily being active language users. What we know with much more certainty is that there are about 4,000 speakers of Gawarbati in and around Arandu in Pakistan, based on the number of known Gawar households and an average number of household members. In all likelihood, there is at least the equal number of speakers, and probably more, on the Afghan side of the border.

 

Language information

Gawarbati [Glottocode: gawa1247; ISO 639-3: gwt] is an Indo-Aryan language. Together with a few closely related varieties, spoken by small communities situated farther down the Kunar Valley (Shumashti, Ningalami and Grangali), it forms a Kunaric clade of its own within the Indo-Aryan languages of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram region. Both Shumashti and Ningalami were near extinction already at the time of the first field studies carried out in the early 1900s, while Grangali is reported to still have some 150 active speakers. A previously assumed inclusion of Dameli in this clade, a neighbouring language community situated upstream in Pakistan, is more uncertain and in need of further studies. Although Gawarbati (previously often written as Gawar-Bati) is the most common name given by speakers and scholars alike, other designations reported—mainly those used by non-Gawars—are Gawari, Aranduiwar, Kohistani, and Narsati. Apart from Gawarbati being one of many languages in a linguistically rich and diverse region, most adult Gawars are multilingual, often significantly so, and such has been the case for the longest time. Contrary to many equally small neighbouring groups, who are settled along smaller tributaries and in more remote higher-altitude areas and around the Kunar Valley, the Gawars inhabit the relatively fertile main valley itself, by the Kunar River. It seems likely that they have been in constant interaction with other groups throughout most of their history. Because of their location on the border between rival powers, in the middle of a thoroughfare of sorts and susceptible to new—cultural, religious or linguistic—influences, they have had to assert their own identity and defend their way of life in the midst of flux.

 

Special characteristics

While the documentation corpus consists of a wide variety of recorded events, the eight texts included in this collection were purposefully chosen to represent a folktale community tradition. Most of the texts therefore reflect local anecdotes and narratives connected with the region, told in the form of monologues, often with mythical ingredients. The narrators are all native speakers of Gawarbati, but like most Gawar they are multilingual, with Gawarbati as their dominant language, usually Pashto as their second language, with some competence in Khowar, and for some of them in Urdu or in an additional local language. All speakers except one are male. This, however, reflects an imbalance in the corpus as a whole, related to culture-specific limitations and expectations in terms of gender roles.

 

Collection contents

This collection contains documentation of Gawarbati, through interviews with Gawar community members. This is the first time that Gawarbati has been comprehensively studied. Together with a few closely related varieties, spoken by small communities situated farther down the Kunar Valley (Shumashti, Ningalami and Grangali), it forms a Kunaric clade of its own within the Indo-Aryan languages of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram region. Although Gawarbati (previously often written as Gawar-Bati) is the most common name given by speakers and scholars alike, other designations reported—mainly those used by non-Gawars—are Gawari, Aranduiwar, Kohistani, and Narsati. Contrary to many equally small neighbouring groups, who are settled along smaller tributaries and in more remote higher-altitude areas and around the Kunar Valley, the Gawars inhabit the relatively fertile main valley itself, by the Kunar River. It seems likely that they have been in constant interaction with other groups throughout most of their history. Because of their location on the border between rival powers, in the middle of a thoroughfare of sorts and susceptible to new—cultural, religious or linguistic—influences, they have had to assert their own identity and defend their way of life in the midst of flux. While the documentation corpus as a whole consists of a wide variety of recorded events, the eight texts included in the present collection were purposefully chosen to represent a folktale community tradition. Most of the texts therefore reflect local anecdotes and narratives connected with the region, told in the form of monologues, often with mythical ingredients.

 

Collection history

The documentation project within which the data was collected was formally active in the time period 2021 to 2024. It was carried out in close collaboration with the speaker community in Pakistan, and under the auspices of the Pakistani organization Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI). The primary aims were to create a spoken corpus of Gawarbati, representing various topics, activities and genres, characteristic of language use in the community.

 

References

Bashir, Elena. 2003. Dardic. In George Cardona & Danesh Jain (eds.), The Indo-Aryan languages, 818–894. London: Routledge.
Cacopardo, Augusto S. 2001. The Gawar. In Alberto M. Cacopardo & Augusto S.
Cacopardo (eds.), Gates of Peristan: history, religion and society in the Hindu Kush (Reports and Memoirs 5), 227–248. Rome: Roma: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente.
Decker, Kendall D. 1992. Languages of Chitral (Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan 5). Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies & Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Grierson, George A. 1919. Indo-Aryan Family: North-Western group: Specimens of the Dardic or Pisacha languages (including Kashmiri), vol. VIII(II) (Linguistic Survey of India). Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Goverment Printing.
Liljegren, Henrik. 2026. Gawarbati deaspiration: An areal feature of Western Hindu Kush. In Andrés Enrique-Arias, Carlota de Benito Moreno & Florencio del Barrio de la Rosa (eds.), The spatial diffusion of linguistic changes, 241–278. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111615806-010.
Liljegren, Henrik & Abdullah Soan. 2025. Gawarbati. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 55(1–2). 134–151. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100325000076.
Morgenstierne, Georg. 1950. Notes on gawar-bati, vol. 2 (Det norske videnskabsakademi. Skrifter. 2: Hist.-filos. klasse 1). Oslo: Jacob Dybwad. 1–62.
Panova, Anastasia & Henrik Liljegren. 2025. Locative and existential predication contrasts in Gawarbati (Indo-Aryan) and the surrounding region. In Chris Lasse Däbritz, Josefina Budzisch & Rodolfo Basile (eds.), Locative and existential predication: on forms, functions and neighboring domains, 115–153. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16838062.
Rzehak, Lutz. 2013. Recalling the past to assert ethnic rights in the present: The case of the Gawars in Afghanistan. ASIEN 129. 22–37.
Tegethoff, Robert & Sviatoslav I. Kaverin. 2023. Documenting Grangali. In Alberto Cacopardo & Augusto Cacopardo (eds.), Roots of Peristan: The pre-Islamic cultures of the Hindukush/Karakorum (Serie Orientale Roma, Nuova Serie 37), 433–452. Rome: ISMEO – Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l’Oriente.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

This work is part of the project Gawarbati: Documenting a vulnerable linguistic community in the Hindu Kush, supported by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council (VR 2020-01500). The project team members were: Henrik Liljegren (PI), Anastasia Panova (research assistant, responsible for glossing and morphological analysis), Fazal Hadi (local team coordinator, responsible for data management and Urdu to English translation), Allauddin Torwali (deputy team coordinator, with the same responsibilities as FH for the latter part of the project), Fazle Akbar (language consultant responsibile for building a lexical database and advicing data collection), Nasirullah Nasir (language consultant responsible for arranging recording events and translations into Urdu), and Abdullah Soan (language consultant responsible for IPA/Gawarbati trancription). The final stages of editing the English translations in the present collection were carried out by Robert Tegethoff, who also improved Gawarbati lexical glosses. With profound gratitude, we also wish to acknowledge all recorded Gawarbati speakers for their voluntary participation and for their willingness to share their memories, their knowledge and their perspectives on their community and life in general. We also want to thank the Forum for Language Initiatives for their institutional support in Pakistan.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Liljegren, Henrik . 2026. Gawarbati: Documentation of a linguistic community in the Hindu Kush. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/c912dc5c-cf3d-412e-8605-84e2cf0ffd7e. Accessed on [insert date here].