Urtsuniwar

Urtsuniwar or Urchuniwar (اُرچؕنوار) is a dialect of the Kalasha-mun spoken in the Urtsun Valley of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.^[2] The total number of speakers is estimated to be around 2,900–5,700 peoples.^[2]

Urtsuniwar
Urchuniwar
اُرچؕنوار
Native to	Pakistan
Region	Urtsun Valley
Ethnicity	Southern Kalash
Native speakers	(2,900–5,700 cited 1992)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Dardic Chitrali Kalasha-mun Urtsuniwar
Writing system	Perso-Arabic script (Nastaliq)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)

Similarity

It has been debated whether Urtsuniwar is a distinct language or a dialect of Kalasha-mun. Urtsuniwar and Kalasha-mun exhibit 70% mutual intelligibility.^[3] Urtsuniwar also shares some similarities with the Ushojo.^[4]

History

The Kafirs of Urtsun were among the last pagans in Afghanistan and Pakistan to convert to Islam in the mid-1900s. The last Urtsun Kafir was Mranzi, who had married a Kalasha from the Biriu valley and moved out of the valley in 1940, just as the conversion to Islam was completed.^[5][6] They renamed their language from Kalasha-mun to Urtsuniwar and later borrowed heavily from the Khowar, changing their identity.^[7] Subsequently, Urtsuniwar started to diverge into a distinct dialect of Kalasha-mun.