The Domaaki Alphabet

Domaaki (ISO 639-3: dmk) is a critically endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 500 people in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan — primarily in Gilgit town and the surrounding valleys of the Karakoram mountain region. It is one of the most endangered languages of South Asia, with the number of fluent speakers declining sharply as younger generations shift to Shina, Burusho, Khowar, or Urdu.

Domaaki is spoken by the Dom community — historically itinerant musicians, craftspeople, and smiths — who have lived alongside the Shina- and Burusho-speaking populations of the Gilgit valley for centuries. The language has been of great interest to linguists precisely because of its unique position as an archaic Indo-Aryan language surrounded by Dardic languages and the language isolate Burusho, making it a valuable source of evidence for the early migration of Indo-Aryan speakers into the mountains of northern Pakistan.

The Domaaki alphabet has 32 letters, all derived from the Perso-Arabic script shared with Urdu, Pakistan's national language. The 32 letters include the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet plus 4 letters unique to the Urdu/Persian script: پ (pe, /p/), چ (che, /tʃ/), ژ (zhe, /ʒ/), and گ (gaf, /g/).

Short vowels are generally not written in everyday Domaaki text but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat (also called zabar, zer, pesh in Urdu). As a language with a very small speaker community and a predominantly oral tradition, fully-vocalised Domaaki texts using harakat are particularly important for language documentation. Linguists working on Domaaki documentation use fully-vocalised transcriptions to accurately preserve the phonological distinctions of this critically endangered Indo-Aryan language.

Domaaki belongs to the Dardic branch of Indo-Aryan, within the larger Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Dardic languages are a geographically defined cluster of Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the mountainous regions of northern Pakistan, northeastern Afghanistan, and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Other Dardic languages include Shina, Khowar, Kashmiri, and Kalasha.

Domaaki's closest relative is Dumaki (ISO 639-3: dmu), spoken in the Hunza valley. The two languages are believed to represent the surviving members of a Dom language cluster that was once more widely distributed across the mountain valleys of northern Pakistan. Both Domaaki and Dumaki are sometimes grouped together as the "Domaaki-Dumaki" subgroup within the Dardic languages, reflecting their shared heritage as the languages of the historically itinerant Dom communities of northern Pakistan.

Yes. Domaaki is written using the Perso-Arabic script, which is written and read from right to left. Each letter connects to adjacent letters within a word (cursive), and most letters change shape depending on their position — initial, medial, final, or isolated form. The script belongs to the Arabic Unicode Block (U+0600–U+06FF) and follows the standard Urdu orthographic convention of Pakistan.

The only exception to right-to-left direction is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL text. Domaaki uses the same Eastern Arabic-Indic digits (۰–۹) as Urdu, standard across Pakistani written materials. Given the small speaker community and predominantly oral tradition of Domaaki, written Domaaki materials are primarily found in linguistic research publications, with Urdu serving as the primary written language of the Dom community in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Domaaki exists in an extraordinary linguistic environment in Gilgit-Baltistan, surrounded by languages from several different families. The dominant languages of the region include Shina (a Dardic language related to Domaaki), Burusho (a language isolate — unrelated to any other known language family), and Khowar (another Dardic language of Chitral). Domaaki has been heavily influenced by all three through centuries of contact, borrowing vocabulary and phonological features from these neighbours.

Domaaki's relationship to Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) is particularly significant for the written form of the language. Like most minority languages of Pakistan, Domaaki uses the Urdu-based Perso-Arabic script for its limited written materials. Urdu is the medium of education and administration in Gilgit-Baltistan, and most Domaaki speakers are multilingual in Shina, Urdu, and often Burusho and Khowar as well. This extensive multilingualism has accelerated language shift away from Domaaki, contributing to its critically endangered status.

Domaaki is of extraordinary importance to historical linguistics and language contact studies. As an archaic Indo-Aryan language that has been geographically isolated in the Karakoram mountains for centuries, Domaaki preserves phonological and lexical features of early Indo-Aryan that have been lost in the lowland Indo-Aryan languages. These archaic features provide valuable evidence for reconstructing Proto-Indo-Aryan and understanding the early stages of Indo-Aryan language diversification.

The language's extensive contact with Burusho — a language isolate — has made Domaaki a key resource for studying language contact and lexical borrowing between unrelated language families. Domaaki has borrowed numerous words from Burusho, Shina, and Khowar while retaining an Indo-Aryan grammatical structure, making it a unique laboratory for contact linguistics. The documentation of Domaaki before further language loss has been a priority for linguists working on endangered Dardic languages of South Asia.