The Khowar speaking people are the largest group in Chitral although they do not share a common origin. People with other ancestry have in the course of time left their languages in favour of Khowar, which is nowadays the widest understood and spoken language of the valley.

Khowar is a literate language, with books, magazines, radio programmes, audio/ video documentation and digital communication facilities, made possible through a few decades of interactions between explorers, anthropologists and linguists.In 1921 Nasirul Malik, an educated youth from Chitral, compiled the first alphabet for Khowar, in Arabic script. Earlier explorers and researchers had used a Roman vernacular script.

Before, there had been a sense of inferiority amongst the Khowar speakers. Now the language community is proud of their language and determined to preserve it. Since the work of the researchers and linguists, there are now more than 200 poets, writers, intellectuals and activists writing in, working on and promoting Khowar.