Many reports revealed in recent past that the Yidgha language, spoken in Lotkuh valley of district Chitral will vanish in a decade or so owing to being just an oral language. New generations had stopped learning their mother tongue and the parents preferred Khowar for their children.

The contemporary language activism in the north has influenced the Yidgha people who started realizing the importance of their heritage language. They established organizations for awareness campaign within their community and save their language.

FLI joined them with the support of its partners; NRSP-SGAFP (USAID) with a program and provided the Yidgha people with a writing system so that they could save their heritage language through documentation. With technical support of FLI and financial by USAID they have reached the milestone. Today the Yidgha is no more just a combination of sounds but has gotten a writing system and started to be used for written communication.

Above image is a leaf from how they have embarked on a journey to promote their language in social media. They are curious and have found some similarity between their own language and Pashto. We endorse it and apprise them of relation that Pashto and Yidgha both are Indo-Iranian and belong to the same family.

Chitral: 12 April 2016

FLI has published eight books, two in each of four languages indigenous to northern Pakistan. The four extremely endangered languages, of which three are spoken in district Chitral, had previously been used only for oral communication, but have now successfully been provided with a writing system under a USAID-funded documentation project.

Yidgha, Dameli and Gawarbati, spoken in different valleys of the district of Chitral, and Ushojo, spoken in Swat, have joined the ranks of languages being used for written communication. These new books contain bilingual word lists and alphabets, all the information necessary both to begin using a language for written communication and to document a language for preservation purposes.

Under this project, FLI selected two people from each language community to train in language documentation and development principles. These individuals then later  held training workshops in their respective communities and trained an average of ten people per community, enabling each community to effectively document their language. Together with support from the wider language communities, research was initiated to identify the unique sounds and elements of each language, develop their alphabets, collect folktales reflecting the rich heritage of each language’s culture, and then publish the resulting work in both written and audio formats that can be used by these communities for generations to come.

A Khowar book containing more than 357 proverbs of the language spoken dominantly in the district of Chitral has been published with Urdu translation. FLI provided technical and financial support to the young author, Afsar Ali Khan in his effort to bring out the fascinating document in his native language. The Khowar (also known as Chitrali) is one of the rare languages spoken in the northern Pakistan which have been used for writing, though for odd purposes, the current collection, titled as Khowar Matalan Gurzain (a pool of Chitrali proverbs) is yet another but handsome addition.

FLI, the forum for language initiatives, a resource center for preservation and promotion of the minor languages of northern Pakistan has been facilitating the people and group of people in documenting their mother tongues for the purpose of their conservation and development by providing documentation training, software tools and other technical support and monetary funding. Mr. Afsar is one of dozen other enthusiasts who completed their book and took the job of serving their mother tongue who were trained by the FLI.

Mr. Afsar, a young linguist, hailing from the beautiful town of Mastuj, has been in the field of language development for years running MLE schools in Khowar language for preschool aged kids in his town Mastuj, district Chitral. The Khowar language owes him a lot of honor for the services he is rendering. The recent contribution in the form of compilation of Khowar proverbs will benefit not only the speech community of Chitral but also the academia for further research in the language in days to come. Congratulating him on his maiden achievement we wish him best of luck for his future endeavors in the field of language development and pledge all our support in his cause which matches the best with ours.

Forum for Language Initiatives, Islamabad held a two-day writers’ workshop for Ushojo language community in Bishigram, Swat. 14 people including teachers, language researchers, poets and young language enthusiasts attended the event. Most of the participants had attended the training under the orthography workshop series FLI has been holding for endangered languages under the Preliminary Documentation Project which is financed by Small Grants and Ambassador’s Fund Program (SGAFP-USAID).

The workshop aimed at discussing the issues arisen out of the orthography workshop in Ushojo Community and deriving ways for their mitigation. Creating the story-idea, explanation of story-parts, various stages of story-writing, publishing the article and bringing solution to orthographic hiccups faced in earlier phase of training were what the workshop was held for.

FLI has been providing language documentation training to lesser-known language communities in north Pakistan since its inception in 2003. One of its targets, Ushojo language community has stepped up and entered the second phase of language documentation process by participating in training which are instrumental in preserving their culture. The resolution and passion they are showing to give their language a writing system are commendable and together with FLI they are very likely to preserve and promote their language. Their language, Ushojo is not far from removing the tag of being ‘undocumented’ as folk tales, idioms, anecdotes etc. of the language are being documented and the participants have started to write in their own language.

Writers’ workshop will be followed by more activities which involve advanced courses for language documentation. Publishing a book in Ushojo is a task under the project and the participants are working hard to achieve that milestone. We wish them success.