Burushaski is a language isolate as its relatedness to any language family of the world has yet to be established. It is spoken in the Northern Gilgit, Hunza-Nagar, and Yasin areas. There are significant dialectal differences between the Yasin variety (Werchikwar) on the one hand, and the Hunza and Nagar varieties on the other. A small pocket of the Burushaski population is also found in Srinagar, the capital city of Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir. The number of speakers of Burushaski is estimated at around 100,000.
Under the Burushaski Language Documentation Project, Dr. Sadaf Munshi, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of North Texas, has recently documented audio and video recordings of popular stories and legends, personal narratives, historical accounts, natural conversations, songs, and poems from the Burushaski language community. This has helped to develop a corpus of linguistic data on the language.
Burushaski is spoken in a region home to speakers of several language families: Indo-Iranian, Tibeto-Burman, and Altaic. It has been greatly influenced by languages such as Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Khowar, Shina, Wakhi, Balti and Kashimiri. Almost all Burushos (speakers of the Burushaski language) are bilingual in their native language and at least one of the other regional languages, e.g. the Indo- Aryan Urdu, Shina, Kashmiri, Khowar, or the Tibeto-Burman Balti. Among these, Urdu has a special status in that it is the lingua franca of the region and the language of literacy. With greater means of mobility, more and more people have chosen to move to bigger cities for education and employment. As a result, they shift to using Urdu as their primary language.