Dameli
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dameli is a language spoken by less than 5,000 people in the remote valley of Damil-Nisar, in the Chitral District of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.
Damil-Nisar is about ten miles south of Drosh on the East Side of the Chitral River. Damil-Nisar leads to a mountain pass which crosses the high Hindu Raj Mountains and could form an important link from Chitral to Dir in Pakistan, but is rarely used because the people of Damil are regarded as wild and untamed and much given to robbing and killing passing travelers, or so they say.
The Dameli Language has not been given study by serious linguists, except that it is mentioned by George Morgenstierne (1926) and Kendall Decker (1992). It is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one.
Dameli is believed to be a dying language, as most speakers are converting to the more widely spoken Khowar language.
The Norwegian Linguist Georg 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, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gujar, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persian and Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu or Persian.
[edit] Books
- Khowar English Dictionary (by Mohammad Ismail Sloan, 1981) ISBN 0-923891-15-3 published in Pakistan, reprinted in 2006
- Decker, Kendall D. (1992) Languages of Chitral ISBN 969-8023-15-1 http://www.ethnologue.com/show_work.asp?id=32850
- Morgenstierne, Georg (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo.
[edit] External links
- Dameli, A Language of Pakistan
- http://www.ling.su.se/ASV/forskning.html#Dameli
- Sam Sloan: History of Chitral
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