According to its genealogical classification, Kalami belongs to the Kohistani subgroup of the north-western zone of Indo-Aryan languages, along with several closely related languages in its geographical vicinity: Torwali, Indus Kohistani, Bateri, Chilisso, and Gawro. Together with a range of other north-western Indo-Aryan mountain languages, these languages are sometimes collectively referred to as ‘Dardic’ languages.
Geographic distribution
Kalam Kohistani is one of about thirty languages that are spoken in the mountain areas of northern Pakistan. Kohistan is a Persian word that means ‘land of mountains’ and Kohistani can be translated as ‘mountain language’. As a matter of fact, there are several distinct languages in the area that are all popularly called Kohistani. The language under study in this paper is spoken in the upper parts of the valley of the Swat River, in the Khyber PakhtunkhwaProvince of Pakistan. The name of the principal village of this area is Kalam, and hence the area is known as Kalam Kohistan. In the older linguistic literature, the language of Kalam Kohistan is referred to as Bashkarik, or as Garwi or Gawri. These names are hardly, if at all, known to the speakers of the language themselves, who normally just call their language Kohistani. However, very recently a number of intellectuals belonging to a local cultural society have started to call their language Gawri, a name that has old historical roots. The same language is also spoken across the mountains to the West of Kalam Kohistan, in the upper reaches of the Panjkora river valley of Upper Dir District. When added together, the two Kalam-Kohistani-speaking communities comprised over 200,000 people.
occur mainly in loanwords. tend to be replaced by, respectively. After the front vowels, the velars are palatalized:.
Tone
Kalami has 5 contrastive tones: high level, high falling, delayed high falling, low level, low rising.
Grammar
Syntax
The default sentence order is SOV, but this can be changed for emphasis.
Morphology
Approximately 50% of Kalami words can not be broken down to smaller morphological forms. Of the other half, most words are made up of about two to three morphemes. This language implements many modifications to the stem as opposed to using distinct morpheme additions. For example, many plural words are formed by changing the stem of words as opposed to modifying with a plural morpheme.
Word
Meaning
masc. sg.
yant
‘is coming’
masc. pl.
yänt
'are coming’
fem.
yent
‘is coming, are coming’
Words can also be modified by suffixes and prefixes.
