Kashmir Valley · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

Dialect and oral traditions

Kashmiri (Koshur) is a Dardic language — the largest surviving one — and not a dialect of anything else. Its nearest relatives are the small Dardic languages of the surrounding mountains, not Punjabi, Dogri or Hindi. Its most-cited structural oddity is verb-second word order: the finite verb sits in the second slot of the clause, as in German and Dutch and almost nowhere else in South Asia. It is written in a Perso-Arabic script adapted with extra vowel signs, and by many Kashmiri Pandits in a Devanagari orthography; the older Sharada script survives now only in manuscripts and in a handful of ritual uses.

Speech varieties

KamrazIndo-Aryan, Dardic

The northern speech of Baramulla, Kupwara, Bandipora and the Lolab side — regarded within the valley as broader and slower than the city register, and closer to the Pahari-speaking fringe.

MarazIndo-Aryan, Dardic

The southern speech of Anantnag, Kulgam, Pulwama and Shopian, with vowel differences that a Srinagari hears immediately. Much of the Bhand Pather tradition and the mushk budji rice belt are in this country.

Yamraz — the Srinagar registerIndo-Aryan, Dardic

The standard of broadcast, publishing and the school textbook, and the most heavily loaded with Persian and Urdu vocabulary because the city was where the administrative language sat.

Speakers: About 67 lakh returned as Kashmiri speakers in the 2011 Census, across all varieties

KishtwariIndo-Aryan, Dardic

A conservative outlying variety spoken beyond the south-eastern rim in the Chenab country. It preserves forms the valley has lost, which makes it the reference point for what older Kashmiri sounded like.

Gojri and Pahari of the rimIndo-Aryan (Rajasthani-affiliated and Western Pahari respectively)

Spoken by the transhumant Gujjar and Bakarwal communities and by the outer Pir Panjal villages. They are the valley's edge in speech terms: the point where Kashmiri stops is not a contour line but a change of language family.

Indigenous terminology

Term	Meaning
Wazwan وازوان	The formal banquet and the profession that produces it. Waz is the cook and wan the shop or trade; the head cook is the vasta waza, and the title is inherited within families.
Trami ترامی	The large tinned-copper platter that four guests share, heaped with rice and quartered between them. The wazwan is counted in tramis, not in plates.
Kangri کانگر	The willow-cased firepot carried under the pheran. A household owns several, and the finest — from Chrar-e-Sharief — are given as gifts.
Pheran فیرن	The loose gown worn over an inner poots, cut to enclose both the wearer and the kangri.
Haakh ہاکھ	The valley's leafy Brassica and the dish made from it. To ask what is cooking and be told haakh is to be told nothing unusual is happening.
Praan پران	The Kashmiri shallot — small, purple, pungent and stored in plaits. It is the allium of the Muslim kitchen; the Pandit kitchen substitutes asafoetida for the same savoury depth.
Ver ویر	The dried compound spice cake broken into fish and vegetable dishes.
Hokh syun ہوکھ سیُن	Literally dry food — the whole class of sun-dried vegetables that constitutes the winter larder, and by extension the winter diet itself.
Talim تعلیم	The coded written notation for a kani shawl or a carpet, chanted aloud line by line to the weaver. It makes a design transmissible and repeatable without a drawing on the loom.
Chillai kalan چلہ کلان	The forty days of deep winter from 21 December, followed by chillai khurd of twenty days and chillai bachha of ten. The calendar of the cold is named and counted, because everything else is scheduled around it.
Karewa (wudar)	A flat-topped terrace of ancient lake sediment along the valley's flanks. Free-draining and flood-proof, it is where saffron, almond and orchard go, and it is also the valley's clearest evidence that it was once a lake.
Kandur کاندر	The neighbourhood baker and his wall oven. Bread is bought, not baked at home, so the kandur wan is a fixed daily circuit and the place a neighbourhood's news moves.
Yemberzal	The narcissus, the first flower up after the snow, and the standing image in Kashmiri poetry for a long-delayed arrival.

Sayings

Saying	Literally	Meaning
Ann poshi teli yeli wan poshi	Food will last as long as the forest lasts	Attributed to Nund Rishi in the fifteenth century and now the most quoted line in the language — used in the valley as an argument about deforestation long before the word existed.
Shiv chhuy thali thali rozan	Shiva abides in every place	Lal Ded's line against distinguishing between a Hindu and a Muslim on the evidence of where they look for God. It is quoted from both sides of that distinction.
Gwaran vonanam kunuy vatsun	My teacher told me one word only	Another vaakh of Lal Ded — that the whole instruction was to look inward — and a standing Kashmiri way of saying that the answer was short and the search long.
Yus karih su bharih	Whoever does it, bears it	A proverb of consequence — the person who acts carries the result, not the person who advised.
Gar firdaus bar roo-e-zameen ast, hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast	If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this	The Persian couplet every visitor is given. Its authorship is genuinely uncertain — it is attributed to Amir Khusrau, to Jahangir and to others, and the attribution shifts with the telling. Kashmiris quote it with more irony than the tourism copy suggests.

Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of Kashmir Valley. (18)