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.

Fourth day of a language documentation workshop, FLI has organized exclusive for university faculties and students is underway in Islamabad in collaboration with University of North Texas (UNT), US and Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. Twenty eight people including faculty members and students from various universities, mostly from North Pakistan are attending the workshop which will run by November 19. Islamic International University, COMSATS and NUML, Islamabad are also being represented in the workshop. The Linguistic Departments of other universities including Baltistan University in Gilgit Baltistan, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University situated in Dir Kohistan, University of Chitral and Degree College of Chitral are also being represented in the event. A language researcher from Swat who is a student of Sydney University is among participants. Participants also include from the Higher Education Department and other language development organizations. The recently discovered language in Pakistan, Mankiyali and severely endangered language of Dir Kohistan, Kalkoti are also part of the event which are represented by four participants.

The main purpose of the workshop is to orient the participants to the new tools and technologies being used in documentation of the languages internationally. Dr. Sadaf Munshi and Mr. Eric Englert from UNT, Dr. Muhammad Kamal from Open University and Naseem Haider from FLI are facilitating sessions in the workshop.