Gawarbati (ISO 639-3: gwt; Glottocode: gawa2147) is an underdescribed Indo-Aryan language spoken along the Kunar River, in the southern part of Lower Chitral District of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province as well as in adjacent areas across the border in Nari (Naray) and Ghaziabad Districts of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province (see Figure 1). As for the number of speakers, only rough estimations can be given. On the Pakistani side of the border, where credible information is somewhat easier to obtain, local residents estimate it to be 4,000 speakers (Fazal Akbar, pc in 2022), based on the number of known Gawarbati speaking houses and an average number of household members. On the Afghan side of the border, the number appears to range between 15,000 and 20,000, based on recent cross-border contacts with local residents (Fazal Akbar, pc in 2022). This would amount to a total of 19,000–24,000 speakers of Gawarbati. A few small linguistic enclaves situated further down the Kunar Valley in Afghanistan are closely related to Gawarbati: Shumashti (Morgenstierne 1945: 241), Ningalami (Morgenstierne 1950: 58) and Grangali (Grjunberg 1971). Both Shumashti and Ningalami were at the verge of extinction already at the time of Morgenstierne’s field studies in the first half of the twentieth century, whereas Grangali is still spoken in three villages in the Digal Valley, according to a recent report (Robert Tegethoff and Sviatoslav Kaverin, pc in 2021).

In this study, an attempt is made at producing an areal-typological profile of the languages of northestern Afghanistan, based on recently collected data from a tight sample of 29 varieties. Traditional language classification is revisited and problematized in the light of linguistic areality and what appear to be effects of historical contact patterns, both in the region and beyond its confines.

This paper analyses the morphosyntactic variation in locative (loc) and locational-existential (loc-ex) clauses in Gawarbati, an underdescribed Indo-Aryan languagewhich has no dedicated formal marking of the loc vs. loc-ex contrast. The analysis also compares figure-ground predications in geographically adjacent languages.The results show that there are three morphosyntactic parameters which reflect,to varying degrees, the loc vs. loc-ex status of the predication: word order, indefiniteness marking and the lexical identity of the predicate. The parameter reflectingthe loc vs. loc-ex alternation most consistently is word order. However, as shownin the corpus study of Gawarbati, what is primarily encoded by word order variation is a range of available information-structural patterns, and they do not alwayseasily match with the loc vs. loc-ex distinction.

Under sammanlagt åtta års vistelse uppe bland bergen i norra Pakistan åren 1998-2010 kunde språkforskaren Henrik Liljegren fördjupa sig i lokala språk, som palula. I denna natursköna miljö sammanfaller hög biodiversitet med kulturell och språklig mångfald. För Sydasien skriver han om äventyren som gjort att han och hela familjen kom nära lokalbefolkningen, som involverades i arbetet och bidrog till etableringen av centret för språkdokumentation, Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI). Berättelsen sträcker sig från 1998 till senaste besöket, i april 2025.

The Indo-European Cognate Relationships (IE-CoR) dataset is an open-access relational dataset showing how related, inherited words (‘cognates’) pattern across 160 languages of the Indo-European family. IE-CoR is intended as a benchmark dataset for computational research into the evolution of the Indo-European languages. It is structured around 170 reference meanings in core lexicon, and contains 25731 lexeme entries, analysed into 4981 cognate sets. Novel, dedicated structures are used to code all known cases of horizontal transfer. All 13 main documented clades of Indo-European, and their main subclades, are well represented. Time calibration data for each language are also included, as are relevant geographical and social metadata. Data collection was performed by an expert consortium of 89 linguists drawing on 355 cited sources. The dataset is extendable to further languages and meanings and follows the Cross-Linguistic Data Format (CLDF) protocols for linguistic data. It is designed to be interoperable with other cross-linguistic datasets and catalogues, and provides a reference framework for similar initiatives for other language families.

The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent. 

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

This book is a unique collection of papers on the languages and cultures in the northern areas of Pakistan and the surrounding regions. In a single volume, the editors have compiled the work of a variety of national and international scholars, long concerned with the linguistic aspects of the many languages discussed here. The basis for most of the articles is material collected in areas difficult to access, presented here in print for the first time. The material sometimes concerns languages likely to soon disappear. The different chapters reflect many of the complex regions and languages of northern Pakistan and its surrounding areas, thus being of interest to linguistic scholars across the world. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Carla Radloff, who was a well-known contributor to studies of the languages of northern Pakistan until her untimely death in 2012.

This study presents and details Nuristani, a phylogenetically distinctgroup of languages spoken in a remote area of northeastern Afghanistan. Largelybased on a recently collected data set from six Nuristani varieties, a large numberof structural properties, representing several linguistic domains (phonology,grammar and lexico-semantics), were analysed and systematically comparedwith world-wide typologies as well as with a tight and representative 53-language sample from the surrounding Hindu Kush region. Nuristani emerges as an integralpart of region-wide areal patterns, shared to a varying extent with languagesbelonging to six distinct phylogenies. In a majority of structural domains, Nuristaniclusters with a Hindu Kush core, including many Indo-Aryan languages,some Iranian, Tibeto-Burman and the isolate Burushaski. While Nuristani generallycomes out as internally homogeneous, one of the languages, Prasun, deviatesfrom that pattern; in certain respects, particularly morpho-syntactically, it clustersmore closely with languages other than its closest Nuristani kin, possibly asthe result of substratal influence. Only a small number of structural propertiescan be termed typically Nuristani: the presence of a retroflex approximant, linguisticcoding of complex spatial distinctions, kinship suffixes, and a set of finetuneddiscourse markers. Nuristani appears to be the source of subareal patternsdetectable also in some neighbouring non-Nuristani communities, most likely relatedto a shared pre-Muslim context.