The Khowar Alphabet

Khowar (ISO 639-3: khw), also known as Chitrali or Qashqari, is the dominant language of Chitral district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province, northern Pakistan. It is spoken by approximately 200,000–300,000 people as a mother tongue, with many more speakers using it as a second language — the trade and prestige language across the Hindu Kush mountain valleys of Chitral.

Khowar is the language of the Kho people, the principal ethnic group of Chitral. It is used across the Chitral valley and its tributaries, and is also spoken in the Gilgit-Baltistan region and the Ghizer district. The language serves as the lingua franca enabling communication across Chitral's remarkable mosaic of minority languages including Kalasha, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Yidgha, and Wakhi.

Khowar is written in the Urdu Nastaliq script — the extended Perso-Arabic abjad used across Pakistan. The Nastaliq alphabet has 38 letters written from right to left. It includes the 28 Arabic letters, 4 letters added for Persian (پ /p/, چ /tʃ/, ژ /ʒ/, گ /g/), and 6 letters unique to South Asian Nastaliq for retroflex sounds and aspiration.

The 6 South Asian additions are: ٹ (tte /ʈ/), ڈ (ddal /ɖ/), ڑ (rre /ɽ/) for retroflex consonants, ں (noon ghunna) for nasalisation, ھ (do chashmi he) for aspiration, and ے (bari ye) for the final /eː/ vowel. All other languages of Chitral that have written forms — including Narsati, Gowro, Dameli, and Kalasha (in modified form) — share this same Nastaliq tradition.

Khowar belongs to the Dardic subgroup of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. The Dardic languages are spoken across Chitral, Dir, Kohistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Jammu & Kashmir. Khowar is classified as the most widely spoken Dardic language in terms of geographic reach and second-language speakers.

Among the Dardic languages, Khowar's closest relatives are the other languages of Chitral — Kalasha, Dameli, and the various Dardic languages of the Hindu Kush. Khowar is distinct from Kashmiri, the only other Dardic language with official recognition. Despite being Indo-Aryan, Khowar shows some features associated with the geographic context of the Hindu Kush, including phonological features influenced by contact with Wakhi (Iranian) and Burushaski (language isolate) in the wider Gilgit-Chitral region.

Chitral district is one of the world's most linguistically diverse areas, with multiple distinct languages spoken in adjacent valleys. Khowar is the dominant and prestige language. Other languages of Chitral include:

• Kalasha: A Dardic language of the Kalash people in three southern valleys (Bumburet, Rumbur, Birir), famous for their pre-Islamic polytheistic traditions and colourful festivals (Chilam Joshi, Uchaw, Chaumos).
• Dameli: A Dardic language of the Domel valley, at the linguistic boundary between Dardic and Nuristani language groups.
• Gawar-Bati / Narsati: An endangered Dardic language of the upper Chitral valleys.
• Yidgha: An Eastern Iranian (Munji-Yidgha) language of the Lutkuh Valley.
• Wakhi: An Eastern Iranian Pamiri language of the Wakhan Corridor border area.

This extraordinary concentration of distinct languages in a single administrative district reflects the geographic isolation of individual valleys in the Hindu Kush, where communities developed separate languages over centuries.

Khowar is not currently considered endangered at the community level — it is the dominant language of Chitral with a robust speaker community and active use as a regional lingua franca. It has a growing written literature, radio broadcasts, and informal digital use. Unlike most other Dardic languages, Khowar has enough speakers and institutional presence to be considered viable.

However, the Endangered Languages Project and Glottolog list Khowar as a language warranting documentation because of its unique status as one of the largest Dardic languages, its complex phonological system, and the importance of preserving its oral literature and vocabulary that encodes the unique ecology and culture of the Hindu Kush mountains. Khowar poetry and the khavand (a traditional Khowar poetic genre) represent important intangible cultural heritage of the Chitral region.

Khowar functions as the lingua franca of Chitral — the language of wider communication that enables speakers of different mother tongues to communicate across valley boundaries. A Kalasha speaker from Bumburet, a Yidgha speaker from Lutkuh, and a Wakhi speaker from the Afghan border area would typically use Khowar to communicate with each other.

This lingua franca role has given Khowar vocabulary influence from multiple directions: Arabic and Persian loanwords from Islamic religious and literary tradition, Pashto loanwords from trade contacts with the southeast, and Burushaski and Tibeto-Burman loanwords from contacts with Gilgit and Baltistan to the east. The resulting Khowar lexicon reflects the unique crossroads position of Chitral between Central Asia, South Asia, and the Caucasus-adjacent Hindu Kush mountain region.