The 4^th International Hindukush Cultural Conference (IHCC4) has been rescheduled for September 14-16, 2022 to be organized in Chitral. The organizers of the mega event announced that new abstracts were recalled and previous submissions were also being refreshed by contacting the authors whose abstracts were approved against the previous call by May 15, 2022. Now, those authors who showed their interest against the previous call can continue with their earlier submissions or withdraw the previous ones and submit a new paper. The historical literary event in the region remained in holdups for two years due to Covid-19. The first proposal of organizing the event was in 2020.

The Anjuman Taraqqi-e- Khowar and Forum for Language Initiatives are jointly organizing the event. Other details about the event, including how to submit new paper etc. can be obtained from this link  https://fli-online.org/IHCC4/

FLI joined hands with one of its partner organizations in organizing a literary congregation in Gawarbati language. Organized by Al-Qalam, a community based organization, the poetry session took place last week in Arandu Valley of Chitral. The purpose of holding the event in the community was to promote Gawarbati poetry and contribute to peace building by arranging a literary get-together in this border region. More than a dozen poets of Gawarbati language presented their poetries in the event. Around 80 people including young, teachers, community elders, literary people and political activists attended the event.

Belonging to the Indo-Aryan group, the Gawarbati language has been declared ‘severely endangered’ by UNESCO, and the major cause of its endangerment is a prolonged Afghan war in its vicinity. This language is spoken by 4000 people living alongside Kunar River, adjacent to Pak-Afghan border area near the village of Arandu in the Chitral District of Pakistan. The literary activities are being used to hold the community involved in peace building activities and encourage the youth to come out of the harsh past, they went through and get involved in activities of their interest. Such activities are also important to strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity of the country.

The poetry event drew the attention of many Gawarbati youth who showed great curiosity to know how to work for their culture and language, alongside motivating other people to use their own language for expressing their feelings and try the poetry in their own language. A senior Gawarbati writer, Mullah Adina Shah, who has published Gawarbati Dictionary was honored in the event for his literary work in the language. Adina Shah has been producing literature in Gawarbati since long and motivating his fellow people within the community.

As a part of language preservation and promotion, FLI has been encouraging its partners from the ethnolinguistic communities of the north Pakistan to increasingly organize poetry session in their localities, as we find the poetry sessions useful to strengthen the literature development in the lesser known languages. Through poetry, the culture is beautifully expressed motivating the fellow language speakers to follow suit. Therefore, we have started stressing upon our partners in order to increase literary activities, especially poetry sessions in maximum language communities in our target region.

FLI facilitated the migrant members of Burushaski language community, living in Karachi to come together and celebrate their cultural event, Guren Usay. Guren Usay is roughly translated in English as ‘Take Care’. The event took place at the Arts Council of the metropolitan city which provided the community members an opportunity to revive their cultural connections. All the three dialects of the Burushaski language; Hunza, Nagar and Yaseen of Gilgitit Baltistan (GB) were represented in the cultural event.

The event started with a panel discussion on ‘the Burushaski Language; its development’. Head of the Department of Baltistan University, Dr. Isa Muhammad chaired the discussion. Ms. Shehnaz Hunzai from Burushaski Research Academy was among the panelists including other Burusho poets and researchers.

Another discussion, on ‘Digital Era and Burushaski’ provided young researchers and social media activists to speak about their language and the issues of the modern times their language was facing. Rizwan Qalandar, Minhaj Mosvi and Ali Ahmed Jan participated in the discussion. Zafar Iqbal, an educationist who travelled all the way from GB to attend the event shed the lights on importance of using mother tongue for various kinds of communication. Dr. Sadaf Munshi, who has worked on Burushaski language and is currently in North Texas University attended the discussion online and spoke about her research work on the language. She also shared her research on Burushaski language, spoken in Sri Nagar, the other side of the border. Dr. Sadaf Munshi, 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.

The important session of the event was Burushaski Poetry, which was participated by poets of all three dialects. The event concluded with Burusho music, where young singers performed and presented new and old Burusho songs, but earlier, a session of story-telling also amused the participants reconnecting them to the folktales of their language.

Hundreds of Burushaski language community people, mostly young attended the event and participated in all the sessions.

Burushaski is regarded an isolate language by the linguists 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. 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.

Chairman of Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL), Dr. Yousuf Khushk paid a visit to FLI today to witness a language documentation training and spent more than two hours at its office. He also met with the Gawarbati language researchers who are currently participating in a workshop at the office. Earlier, the Executive Director of FLI and Chairman of FLI’s Board received him and briefed him about the current projects of the organization. He inquired about various stages of language documentation and appreciated FLI’s efforts to preserve and promote Pakistan’s languages.

Dr. Khushk showed great interest to collaborate with FLI in the future, and expressed his desire to increase the cooperation between the two organizations. He said that PAL and FLI will benefit from each other’s expertise and resources which will result in strengthening of our cultural and linguistic diversity. Dr. Khushk was presented with FLI’s books, it has published in or about the indigenous languages of Pakistan. He revealed that he was working on developing a cultural museum at PAL premises and sought FLI’s cooperation in the process. FLI management wowed to collaborate with PAL as both the organizations seemed to have shared the goals, especially of strengthening the cultural and linguistic diversity of the country.

The culture and language admirers of Gilgit Baltistan (GB) got together for a policy dialogue in Gilgit city last week. More than two dozen people including writers, authors, and poets of five major indigenous language communities as well as people from relevant government bodies, civil society, media and academia participated in the discussion and pledged to reach a consensus on what was needed to be done for protecting and promoting of the languages spoken in the region. Shina, Balti, Khowar, Burushaski and Wakhi languages were represented in the event by their writers and researchers while the departments of education and tourism by their officials. The items of Culture in GB are still handled by the tourism department. Three media workers also became part of the event who highlighted the event’s significance in their dailies the other day. The event also became a story on the social media igniting debate on language preservation thanks to the vloggers who developed short video clips of the session and uploaded to social media platforms, spreading the word that how languages of GB are to be taken up. The civil society members also joined hands with the language lovers in the event and expressed their support to them so that the intangible cultural assets of the region could be preserved and promoted.

The participants agreed to work jointly, especially for resolving the issues mostly that are related to individuals surfacing at community level. They pledged to come together for broader consultation with other communities and also formed a committee for coordination of inter-communities consultation and interaction. The government officials who were present on the occasion, encouraged the community researchers and writers to jointly work for their languages so that the process of consensus building and agreement over the language related initiatives would be completed which will result in making the practice easy for institutions to work on cultures and languages. The participants thanked FLI for organizing the joint event for major stakeholders in the region, and hoped that the activity would impact the language development trend in a positive way and the effect the policy making process in a helpful manner.