The Yidgha Alphabet

The Yidgha 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 Persian and Urdu: پ (pe, /p/), چ (che, /tʃ/), ژ (zhe, /ʒ/), and گ (gaf, /g/).

Short vowels are generally not written in everyday Yidgha text but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat. As an endangered language with a primarily oral tradition and limited standardised written form, fully-vocalised Yidgha texts using harakat are particularly important for language documentation and for accurately recording the distinctive East Iranian vowel system of Yidgha.

Yidgha (also known as Yidga, Yidgah, or Yidghah) is an endangered Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Lutkuh (Lotkuh) Valley of upper Chitral District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan. The language is spoken by an estimated 6,000–12,000 people in this remote high-altitude valley of the Hindu Kush. It is named after the valley community (Yidgha) where it is spoken.

Yidgha belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. Its closest living relative is Munji, spoken by a small community in the Munjan Valley of Badakhshan Province, northeastern Afghanistan — just across the border. Together, Yidgha and Munji form the Munji-Yidgha subgroup of Eastern Iranian — a distinct branch that is separate from the Pamiri languages of Tajikistan (such as Shughni and Bartangi) and entirely separate from Urdu and Khowar. The Eastern Iranian family also includes Ossetic, Pashto, and the now-extinct Sogdian and Bactrian languages historically spoken in Central Asia.

Yidgha preserves the most significant archaic feature of the Munji-Yidgha subgroup: the /w/ pronunciation of و (vav) — directly inherited from Old Iranian *w — while surrounding Urdu and Persian use /v/ for this letter. This /w/ realisation (bilabial approximant, like English "w") is a major linguistic archaism shared with its sister language Munji and represents the conservative Eastern Iranian phonological character of the Munji-Yidgha branch.

Yidgha also preserves archaic Eastern Iranian vocabulary and morphological patterns that link it to Old Iranian texts, including features reminiscent of Avestan and Bactrian — the Middle Iranian language once spoken across the Hindu Kush. The Lutkuh Valley's geographic isolation in the high Chitral mountains has helped preserve these archaic features despite centuries of contact with Khowar (the dominant language of Chitral) and Urdu. Like Munji, Yidgha represents a significant linguistic window into the Eastern Iranian tradition of the Hindu Kush and Karakoram region.

Yidgha is spoken exclusively in the Lutkuh (Lotkuh) Valley, a remote high-altitude valley in upper Chitral District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, northwestern Pakistan. Chitral District borders Afghanistan to the west and north and is located in the Hindu Kush mountain range. The Lutkuh Valley is a tributary valley of the Chitral River (Kunar River) system.

The Yidgha-speaking community is entirely centred in this single geographically isolated valley, which has contributed to both the preservation of archaic Eastern Iranian features and the language's current endangered status. There is no significant Yidgha-speaking diaspora outside Chitral. The related language Munji — the closest linguistic relative — is spoken in the Munjan Valley of Badakhshan, Afghanistan, directly across the Afghan border, reflecting a historical distribution of the Munji-Yidgha subgroup across the Hindu Kush that has since contracted to these two isolated valley communities.

Yidgha and Munji are the closest living relatives of each other within the Eastern Iranian language family, together forming the Munji-Yidgha subgroup. Despite being separated by the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — with Munji in the Munjan Valley of Afghan Badakhshan and Yidgha in the Lutkuh Valley of Pakistani Chitral — the two languages share a common ancestor distinct from all other living Eastern Iranian languages.

Both languages preserve the archaic /w/ pronunciation of و (vav) inherited from Old Iranian, contrasting with the /v/ of surrounding languages. Both use the same Perso-Arabic script with 32 letters following the regional convention (Dari/Afghan for Munji; Urdu/Khowar for Yidgha). The two languages diverged from a common ancestral form of the Munji-Yidgha branch and show systematic phonological correspondences that linguists use to reconstruct the shared proto-language. Despite their relatedness, Yidgha and Munji are generally not mutually intelligible without prior exposure, as they have diverged in vocabulary, phonology, and morphology over an extended period of separation.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Yidgha 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 Urdu/Khowar script convention standard across Chitral District and Pakistan.

The only exception to right-to-left direction is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL text. Yidgha uses the same Eastern Arabic-Indic digits (۰–۹) as Urdu, standard across Pakistani publications. As a language with a predominantly oral tradition and very limited written output, Yidgha written materials are extremely rare — making the Perso-Arabic conventions of Urdu and Khowar particularly important as the template for any written Yidgha texts produced in Chitral.