Kinnaur & Spiti · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
A language-family boundary runs through the middle of one district, and it is the single most important fact about this region. Below the Sutlej gorge the speech is Western Pahari — Indo-Aryan, related to the dialects of Shimla and Mandi. Above it, Kinnauri is Tibeto-Burman, of the West Himalayish group, with its own numeral system, its own verb morphology and almost no Indo-Aryan core vocabulary. Above Sumdo the language changes again, to Bhoti, which is a Tibetic language written in the Tibetan script. So a traveller going a hundred and fifty kilometres up one river valley crosses two family boundaries, and the people on either side of each boundary have intermarried, traded and shared festivals for centuries. Kinnauri is written in Devanagari when it is written at all, which is not often. Bhoti has a literate monastic tradition older than most of the region's buildings, which means the higher and poorer valley is the one with the deeper written culture — the reverse of the usual expectation.
Speech varieties
The prestige variety, spoken around Kalpa, Sangla and Reckong Peo, and the one meant when a speaker says "Kinnauri" without qualification. Heavily loaded with Hindi vocabulary through school, radio and the apple trade.
Speakers: Roughly 80,000 returned as Kinnauri in the 2011 Census, across all varieties
Spoken in Chitkul and Rakcham at the head of the Baspa valley, and distinct enough from the Kalpa variety that speakers do not simply understand one another. Two villages, one language, and a very small number of speakers.
A cluster of closely related but separately named varieties through the Pooh, Kanam and Ropa areas, each village group holding to its own. They shade towards Tibetic in vocabulary the further up the valley they sit.
A Tibetic language written in the Tibetan script and closely related to the speech of Ladakh and western Tibet. Local usage often simply calls it Bhoti; the classical written register is the language of the monastery, and the spoken one has diverged from it as much as any spoken language does from its liturgical form.
The Mahasu and Bushahri speech of the Rampur and Nichar side, Indo-Aryan and continuous with the dialects of Shimla district. It reaches up the gorge and stops; the change is not gradual so much as village by village.
Indigenous terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Kath-kuni काठ-कुणी | Building in alternating courses of dry stone and timber, without mortar. Literally the wood-and-corner method — the corner joint is the structural idea. |
| Dohru दोहरू | The pinned woollen wrap worn by Kinnauri women, made from one uncut length of handwoven cloth. |
| Chilgoza / neoza चिलगोज़ा | The edible seed of the chilgoza pine, and by extension the autumn harvest of it — a wild crop with private ownership rules. |
| Chhang छंग | Home-fermented barley beer, offered to any guest who enters. Refusing outright is not really available as an option. |
| Arak अरक | The spirit distilled at home from the same fermented mash, in a stacked pot still. |
| Tsampa सत्तू / རྩམ་པ། | Roasted barley flour, kneaded with tea into a meal that requires no further cooking. The Sutlej's answer to the plains' sattu, arrived at independently and for the same reason. |
| Gompa གོན་པ། | A Buddhist monastery, and specifically the assembly hall at its centre. In Spiti the gompa was historically also a landholder, a grain store and a court. |
| Chorten and mani wall མཆོད་རྟེན། | The reliquary stupa and the long low wall of carved prayer stones beside a path. Both are passed on the left, and the walls are built up stone by stone over generations by travellers. |
| Devta and rath देवता / रथ | The village god and the palanquin it travels on, carried on the shoulders of its attendants. The god has a territory, a treasury and a staff, and is a legal person in village practice. |
| Gur गुर | The oracle through whom a village deity speaks, entering trance at fixed occasions. The role is usually hereditary within a family and not sought. |
| Kuhl कूहल | The contour irrigation channel that carries glacier meltwater along a hillside to the terraces. Maintenance is collective, the water turn is timed, and the whole village calendar hangs on the day the kuhl is opened. |
| Ogla and phaphra ओगला / फाफड़ा | The sweet and the bitter buckwheat, sown where nothing else will finish before the frost. |
| Dzo ཛོ། | The yak–cattle cross, more tractable than a yak and more cold-tolerant than a cow, and the plough animal of the high fields. Male hybrids are sterile, so the cross has to be made afresh each time. |
Sayings
| Saying | Literally | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Where the deodar ends, the god changes his name | — | A way of describing the treeline as a cultural boundary, not just a botanical one. Said of the stretch above Pooh where the temples stop and the gompas start. |
| Guest first, then the fire | — | The order of hospitality in a house with one hearth and limited fuel — the visitor is warmed and given chhang before anything else in the household is attended to. |
| A kuhl has no owner and every owner | — | The irrigation channel belongs to nobody and is maintained by everybody; a household that skips its turn on the repair party loses its turn on the water. |
| The barley does not wait | — | Said of the hundred-day season. Every task above the treeline has a window measured in days, and there is no second attempt within the year. |
Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of Kinnaur & Spiti. (17)