Inku language


Inku was an Indo-Aryan language formerly spoken throughout Afghanistan by four of the country's itinerant communities: the Jalali, the Pikraj, the Shadibaz and the Vangawala. Itinerant communities in Afghanistan, whether Inku-speaking or not, are locally known as "Jats", a term which is not a self-designation of the groups but rather a collective, often pejorative name given by outsiders. It is presumably for this reason that the language is called Jakati in the Ethnologue encyclopedia.
Each of the four groups speaks a variety with slight differences compared to the others. According to their local tradition, their ancestors migrated in the 19th century from the Dera Ismail Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan areas of eastern Balochistan. Such an origin suggests that Inku may be related to the Saraiki language spoken there, though nothing is conclusively known.
The total population of the four Inku-speaking groups was estimated to be 7,000 as of the end of the 1970s. There is no reliable information about their present state, though it is unlikely that many have survived the recent upheavals in the country, and Ethnologue states, though without citing a source, that Inku's last speakers "probably survived into the 1990s".
Linguistic materials about the varieties spoken by the Shadibaz, Vangawala and Pikraj were collected by Aparna Rao in the 1970s, but they have not been published or analysed yet.

Example text

The following is an extract of a text narrated in 1978 by a man of the Chenarkhel subgroup of the Vangawala: