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KASHMIRI

The language of the Valley of Kashmir. It is the southernmost of the Dardic group of the Indo-Aryan subfamily of languages. It is spoken by about 1,500,000 people. There are minor dialectal differences within the language, the most important being between the speech of the Muslim majority, who use many Persian and Arabic loanwords, and that of the Hindu minority, who borrow, though not so freely, from Sanskrit. Greater differences are found in the dialects to the south, such as Kashtawari.

The Dardic core of Kashmiri is a language which has descended from an Old Indo-Aryan dialect closely related to Vedic, without having shared in the Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit) developments that have yielded the peculiarities of most of the Modern Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Marathi, etc.). One Dardic feature is the failure of some consonant clusters to simplify as in the Prakrits and the languages derived from them; e.g., Kashmiri treh “three” contrasts with Hindi tin. For many centuries, however, there has been a strong Sanskritic influence in Kashmir, whose Brahmans have been known for their Sanskrit learning; the Kashmiri language has borrowed many Sanskrit words, so that it is now strongly “Indianized.”

In general Kashmiri grammar is very like that of the other Indo-Aryan vernaculars. One peculiarity is the occur¬rence of three past participles (instead of one) from which past tenses are formed, denoting recent past, remote past, and indefinite past.

Kashmiri shares with the other Dardic languages, and with Lahnda and Sindhi, the use of pronominal suffixes as subjects of certain verb forms and as objects and other oblique cases with verbs in general; e.g., di-m “give it to me” and wuchan-am “they will see me,” where -m and -am represent the first person. It seems that such forms are survivals of the enclitic pronouns of Old Indo-Aryan. They have been lost in Modern Indo-Aryan except in these languages, which are in contact with and influenced by the Iranian languages, all of which show pronominal suffix systems of even greater complexity than those found in Kashmiri and its neighbors.

The Kashmir Brahmans are famous for their devotion to Sanskrit literature and their production of Sanskrit works of importance. This literary activity has carried over into the composition of works in Kashmiri also, from the 14th century on. The earliest work is the collection of verses in praise of the god Siva (Shiva) by the poetess Lalla, the Lallaval{yani. Numerous Hindu religious works have been composed down to the present day. There have also been Muslim works based on Persian models. A Sanskrit work of some interest is a grammar of Kashmiri, the Kasmira-sabdamrta, composed by Pandit Isvara Kaula at the end of the 19th century.

The Kashmiri language is written by Muslims in Persian characters, which are ill suited for the purpose since their rudimentary vowel-signs fail to represent the complicated Kashmiri vowel system. Hindus use the Sarada alphabet, the local characters related to the Devanagari alphabet of India.

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