The Ishkashimi Alphabet

The Ishkashimi alphabet has 32 letters, all derived from the Perso-Arabic script. The 32 letters include the 28 Arabic letters plus 4 letters unique to Persian/Dari: پ (pe, /p/), چ (che, /tʃ/), ژ (zhe, /ʒ/), and گ (gaf, /g/).

Short vowels are generally not written but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat. The script is an abjad — a consonant-based writing system in which the reader supplies the vowels from context.

Ishkashimi is spoken primarily in the Ishkashim district of Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan. The district sits at a strategic point on the Amu Darya (Oxus) river, which forms part of the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border, and a small community of speakers also exists on the Tajik side.

With an estimated 1,000–2,000 speakers, Ishkashimi is one of the most endangered languages of the Hindu Kush-Pamir region. The dominance of Dari Persian as the regional language of education, commerce, and government has placed strong pressure on Ishkashimi, and many younger community members are now Dari-dominant.

Ishkashimi belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Iranian language family, which is itself part of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Within Eastern Iranian, Ishkashimi is classified in the Shughni-Yazghulami subgroup, placing it alongside languages such as Shughni, Sanglechi, Zebaki, and Yazghulami — all spoken in the Pamirs and Hindu Kush mountains.

This makes Ishkashimi more closely related to the Pamiri languages of Tajikistan than to Dari Persian (which is Southwest Iranian) or Pashto (which is Southeast Iranian). Eastern Iranian languages preserve many archaic features of Old Iranian that were lost in the more widely spoken Western Iranian languages such as Persian.

Yes — Ishkashimi and Ishkashmi are alternate spellings of the same language. Both names refer to the Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Ishkashim district of Badakhshan. The variation arises from different transliteration conventions for the name of the Ishkashim district itself.

Linguists and language databases (including Glottolog and SIL) recognise both spellings as referring to the same language with ISO 639-3 code isk. The language is also sometimes referred to as Sanglechi-Ishkashimi in some classifications, reflecting its close relationship with the nearby Sanglechi dialect spoken further up the Sanglich valley.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Ishkashimi is written and read from right to left. Each letter in the alphabet connects to adjacent letters within a word (cursive), and most letters change shape depending on their position — initial, medial, final, or isolated form.

The only exception to the right-to-left direction is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL text. The script belongs to the Arabic Unicode Block (U+0600–U+06FF) and shares the same 32-letter set as Dari Persian, the official language of Afghanistan.

Ishkashimi is classified as severely endangered due to its extremely small speaker population of approximately 1,000–2,000 individuals. The language faces intense pressure from Dari Persian, which dominates education, government, media, and commerce throughout Badakhshan Province. Most Ishkashimi speakers are bilingual in Dari, and language transmission to younger generations has weakened significantly.

Additional factors contributing to language endangerment include geographic isolation, limited literacy materials in Ishkashimi, and the decades of conflict in Afghanistan that have disrupted traditional community structures. Efforts to document and preserve Ishkashimi have been made by linguists and organisations such as the Endangered Languages Project, but the language remains critically under-resourced compared to larger regional languages.