Language Shift In the Neelam Valley: A Case Study of the Kundal Shahi Language

Abstract

District Neelam is the most linguistically diverse district in all of historic Jammu and Kashmir, with 171,000 people speaking no fewer than seven languages as their mother tongue. Of these, the Kundal Shahi language is the only language that is spoken nowhere outside the district. It is closely related to Kashmiri and Shina and heavily influenced by Hindko. It also shares certain unique features and lexical items with languages spoken far from Kundal Shahi village, from Khowar to the Northwest to Kangri to the Southeast, in Himachal Pradesh, India. Linguistically speaking, a comparative analysis of the lexical items shows that it shares a slightly higher percentage of lexical items with Shina than Kashmiri. It also shares tonal features with Shina. On the other hand the analysis of the morphology, and case marking in particular, indicates closer affinity with Kashmiri. Interestingly, the umlaut vowel found in Kundal Shahi has not been reported in any other language but in Guresi Shina, a dialect of Shina spoken in Taobutt, the village at the head of the Neelam Valley. Since the construction of the Neelam Highway in the late sixties and the estab lishment of the market in the Kundal Shahi village in 1970, there has been an, influx of Hindko speakers into the region and Hindko became the local lingua franca. Circumstances forced Kundal Shahi speakers to use Hindko in more and more social contexts. When Kundal Shahi speaking men malTied Hindko speaking women, Hindko became the household language. As the Hindko speaking community grew, a stigma was attached to speaking the Kundal Shahi language. Kundal Shahi speaking parents came to think of the ability to speak Kundal Shahi as not just an additional cognitive burden but also a social disadvantage to their children. My research revealed that the youngest fluent Kundal Shahi speakers are now in their forties, suggesting that a drastic language shift took place before 1970, a few years after the road came through. Disrupted intergenerational transmission is the principal indicator that a language is seriously endangered. Other indicators, including the absolute number of speakers, the proportion of speakers within the total population, trends in existing language domains, the response to new domains and media, materials available for language education and literacy, can also show the level of endangerment of a language. This study has established that Kundal Shahi meets the criteria of a seriously endangered language. While members of the Kundal Shahi community express pride in their ancestral language, which to them represents tradition, collective identity and group cohesion, their actual behavior is motivated by the sti gma attached to speaking their language. Unless there are immediate initiatives within the community to act on their expressed desire for the language to survive, I anticipate that Kundal Shahi will be extinct within half a century. If language revitalization IS to remam a rea listic possibility, thorough documentation and description of Kundal Shahi is urgent.