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36-795: Wakhi is one of several languages that belong to the areal Pamir language group . It is believed to be a descendant of the Scytho-Khotanese language once spoken in the Kingdom of Khotan . The Wakhi people are occasionally called Pamiris and Guhjali. It is spoken by the inhabitants of the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, parts of Gilgit-Baltistan (the former NAs) of Pakistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan, and Xinjiang in Western China . The Wakhi use

72-415: A linguistic area , area of linguistic convergence , or diffusion area , is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact . The languages may be genetically unrelated , or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as

108-448: A stop consonant ), which was followed by a tone split where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until André-Georges Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of

144-509: A classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", Murray Emeneau laid the groundwork for the general acceptance of the concept of a sprachbund. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent's Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of features that were not inherited from a common source, but were areal features , the result of diffusion during sustained contact. These include retroflex consonants , echo words , subject–object–verb word order, discourse markers , and

180-696: A family of institutions created by Aga Khan IV with distinct but complementary mandates to improve the welfare and prospects of people in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. It focuses on the revitalization of communities in the Muslim world —physical, social, cultural, and economic. The AKTC was founded in 1988 and is registered in Geneva , Switzerland , as a private non-denominational philanthropic foundation . The trust has restored and rehabilitated over 350 monuments and historic sites all over

216-747: A genetic relationship ( rodstvo ) and those arising from convergence due to language contact ( srodstvo ). Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз ( yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article. In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund , defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax , morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary. Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson , have relaxed

252-630: A major field of research in language contact and convergence. Some linguists, such as Matthias Castrén , G. J. Ramstedt , Nicholas Poppe and Pentti Aalto , supported the idea that the Mongolic , Turkic , and Tungusic families of Asia (and some small parts of Europe) have a common ancestry, in a controversial group they call Altaic . Koreanic and Japonic languages, which are also hypothetically related according to some scholars like William George Aston , Shōsaburō Kanazawa, Samuel Martin and Sergei Starostin , are sometimes included as part of

288-938: A more significant national/regional language, remoteness, and political instability, no one orthographic standard has managed to rise to the level of a singular unifying writing system. The Perso-Arabic script for the Wakhi language has been derived from the Persian alphabet used in Afghanistan . However, there are sounds in Wakhi that are not found in Persian. Here, two diverging conventions have emerged, one in Afghanistan and another in Pakistan (and Pakistani-controlled Gilgit-Baltistan ). Pashto has inspired letters in Afghanistan to represent missing sounds in Wakhi, especially

324-565: A number of similarities including syntax and grammar , vocabulary and its use as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms and word order which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities; in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased linguists towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to

360-399: A sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Without knowledge of the history of a regional group of similar languages, it may be difficult to determine whether sharing indicates a language family or a sprachbund. In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from

396-710: Is also spoken in the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County , in Xinjiang of China, mainly in the township of Dafdar . There are approximately 21,000 Wakhi in Russia , Most of them have migrated from Tajikistan and Afghanistan . There are some Wakhi villages in Turkey in the eastern regions, where they have migrated from Afghanistan in 1979 during the Afghan and Russian war . Traditionally, Wakhi

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432-742: Is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan , Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai–Kadai , Austronesian (represented by Chamic ) and Mon–Khmer families. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. A well-known example is the similar tone systems in Sinitic languages (Sino-Tibetan), Hmong–Mien, Tai languages (Kadai) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic). Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (but no tonal distinctions on checked syllables ending in

468-645: Is registered with the Government of Pakistan and collaborates with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Lok Virsa Pakistan. The Association is working to preserve the Wakhi language and culture and document their poetry and music . Radio Pakistan Gilgit relays the Wakhi radio programme "Sadoyah Boomy Dunyo", the voice of the roof of the world. The Wakhi Cultural Association has arranged more than twenty programmes since 1984, which include cultural shows, musical nights, and large-scale musical festivals with

504-607: Is the more common script, in Pakistan, similar with Urdu and other orthographies of Northern Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Gilgit-Baltistan , Nastaliq is the more common script. Notes : When Wakhi is written in Cyrillic, the sounds are usually represented by these letters: A Latin alphabet, which in some variants includes Cyrillic and Greek letters, was developed in 1953 by I.I. Zaroubine and V. S. Sokolova, and further developed by A.L Grünberg and I.M Stéblinn-Kamensky in

540-585: The South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbo-Croatian ), Greek , Balkan Turkish , and Romani . All but one of these are Indo-European languages but from very divergent branches, and Turkish is a Turkic language . Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive , future tense formation, and others. The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as

576-643: The Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in China , Russia , and Turkey . In the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, Wakhi is spoken from Putur , near Ishkashim , to the upper reaches of the Wakhan River . In Tajikistan, the Wakhi and other communities that speak one of the Pamir languages refer to themselves as Pamiri or Badakhshani, and there has been a movement to separate their identity from that of

612-531: The quotative . Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families: Indo-Aryan , Dravidian , Munda and Tibeto-Burman . This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become

648-684: The Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin. Similarly, the unrelated Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Many languages in the region are of the isolating (or analytic) type, with mostly monosyllabic morphemes and little use of inflection or affixes , though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology . Shared syntactic features include classifiers , object–verb order and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families. In

684-594: The SAE language group . Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period . The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members. Alexander Gode , who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua , characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic , and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of

720-551: The SAE features. Language families that have been proposed to actually be sprachbunds The work began to assume the character of a comparison between Hopi and western European languages. It also became evident that even the grammar of Hopi bore a relation to Hopi culture, and the grammar of European tongues to our own "Western" or "European" culture. And it appeared that the interrelation brought in those large subsummations of experience by language, such as our own terms "time," "space," "substance," and "matter." Since, with respect to

756-717: The collaboration of Lok Virsa Pakistan, the Aga Khan Cultural Service Pakistan (AKCSP) , and Pakistan television . In 2000, the WCA won a "Best Programme" organizer award in the Silk Road Festival from the President of Pakistan , Pervez Musharraf . A computerized codification of the Wakhi script has been released, which will help to promote the language development program and documentation of Wakhi poetry, literature, and history . Wakhi

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792-868: The early 1960s: Sample text from a Bible translation published in 2001 is shown below: The Wakhi lexicon exhibits significant differences with the other Pamir languages. Gawarjon's comparison of the dialects of Sarikoli and Wakhi spoken in China is reproduced below. In Pakistan multiple books have been published since 1980s. X̌ikwor zik by Master Haqiqat, Religious hymes by Riaz Ahmed Riaz. Qaida e Wakhi Zaban by Ahmed Jami Sakhi. Magazines and Parlon Wakhi by Karim Khan Saka. "Beyoz-e-Bulbul" by Nazir Ahmad Bulbul . A collection of old and new poems folklores compiled by Bulbulik Heritage Center, Gulmit. Sprachbund A sprachbund ( / ˈ s p r ɑː k b ʊ n d / , from German : Sprachbund [ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt] , lit. 'language federation'), also known as

828-671: The language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund . The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact in the time of the Migration Period and later, continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of

864-687: The largest Wakhi population in Pakistan. The Wakhis of Ishkoman lives primarily in the Karambar valley, the town of Imit, and beyond. In Yasin , they live mainly in the vicinity of Darkot, and in Yarhkun, they are found in Baroghil and a few other small villages in the high, upper portion of the valley. In Pakistan, the central organization of the Wakhi is the Wakhi Cultural Association Pakistan (WCA). This organization

900-449: The majority of Persian-speaking Tajiks . Linguists universally refer to Wakhi as an East Iranian language independent of Tajik Persian, but many Tajik nationalists insist that Wakhi and other Pamir languages are dialects of Tajik Persian. In Gilgit-Baltistan , Wakhi is spoken in the sparsely populated upper portions of five of the northernmost valleys: Hunza , Gojal , Ishkoman , Yasin , Gupis , and Yarkhun . The Hunza Valley has

936-633: The northeastern part of the Tibetan plateau spanning the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu , is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest Mandarin Chinese , Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages . Standard Average European ( SAE ) is a concept introduced in 1939 by Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe which shared common features. Whorf argued that these languages were characterized by

972-497: The other Romance languages in relation to Romanian, and the other Slavic languages such as Polish in relation to Bulgaro-Macedonian. Languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area have such great surface similarity that early linguists tended to group them all into a single family, although the modern consensus places them into numerous unrelated families. The area stretches from Thailand to China and

1008-458: The purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including Roy Andrew Miller , John C. Street and Karl Heinrich Menges . Gerard Clauson , Gerhard Doerfer , Juha Janhunen , Stefan Georg and others dispute or reject this. A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as vowel harmony and agglutination , is that they are due to areal diffusion. The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund , in

1044-629: The requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy. A rigorous set of principles for what evidence is valid for establishing a linguistic area has been presented by Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark. The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to Jernej Kopitar 's description in 1830 of Albanian , Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of " nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie ", which has been rendered by Victor Friedman as "one grammar with the [ sic ] three lexicons". The Balkan Sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian,

1080-542: The self-appellation 'X̌ik' (ethnic) and suffix it with 'wor'/'war' to denote their language as 'X̌ik-wor' themselves. The noun 'X̌ik' comes from *waxša-ī̆ka- (an inhabitant of *Waxša- 'Oxus', for Wakhan, in Wakhi 'Wux̌.' There are other equivalents for the name Wakhi (Anglicised) or Wakhani (Arabic and Persian), Vakhantsy (Russian), Gojali/Gojo (Dingrik-wor/Shina), Guyits/Guicho (Burushaski), Wakhigi/Wakhik-war (Kivi-wor/Khow-wor) and Cert (Turki). The language belongs, as yet to be confirmed according to studies and sources, to

1116-549: The source of letters for phonemes that don't exist in Persian. The vowels are shown to reflect Urdu pronunciations and not the Dari / Tajik pronunciation. Meaning that, for example, the phoneme [ɔ], which is equivalent to Iranian Persian [ ɒː ] after having undergone a chain shift , is not written with alef "آ / ا /ا ـا‎", but with the letter waw " او / و / ـو ‎ ". Stylistically, while in Afghanistan Naskh

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1152-546: The source of letters for phonemes that don't exist in Persian. This orthographic standard has similarities to the orthographies of other Pamir languages , such as Shughni and Munji . Notes : The below table is the Pakistani version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet for the Wakhi language.[1] This alphabet has also been derived from the alphabet of Dari (Persian). However, Urdu , Pakistan's national language, has been

1188-1002: The southern group of the Pamir languages, in the Iranian group of the Indo-European family (450) of languages, where the Ishkashmi, Shighni/...nani and Wakhi languages are included. A very rough estimate of the population of Wakhis is 58,000 worldwide. The Wakhi live in six countries. In the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan , the Wakhi people mainly live in Gojal , Ishkoman , and Darkut , as well as in Chitral District's Broghol . They live in parts of Wakhan in Afghanistan , Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan , and

1224-513: The traits compared, there is little difference between English , French , German , or other European languages with the 'possible' (but doubtful) exception of Balto-Slavic and non-Indo-European , I have lumped these languages into one group called SAE, or "Standard Average European." Aga Khan Trust for Culture The Aga Khan Trust for Culture ( AKTC ) is an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN),

1260-474: The various retroflex sounds missing in Persian. Urdu and orthographies of other languages of Gilgit-Baltistan have been the inspiration in Pakistan. The below table is the Afghan version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet for the Wakhi language. The alphabet has been derived from the alphabet of Dari (Persian), one of Afghanistan's national languages. Pashto , the other national language of Afghanistan, has been

1296-446: Was not a written language. Wakhi people live in 4 countries, Afghanistan , Tajikistan , Pakistan , and China , and are in contact with speakers of various other languages. Writing systems have been developed for the language using Arabic , Cyrillic , and Latin scripts , each with inspirations from neighboring languages and orthographic conventions. However, due to the pluricentric nature of Wakhi dialects, marginalization in favour of

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