Pangwali


Pangwali is a language spoken in the Pangi Tehsil of Chamba district in Himachal Pradesh. The language is threatened to go extinct.

Dialect

Following are the dialects of the language:
  1. Killar
  2. Purthi
  3. Sach
  4. Dharwasi
Killar, being the headquarter of the Tehsil, is the dialect which is widely understood. Sach dialect is said to have the maximum Sanskrit features in it.

Script

The native script of the language is Takri script. Nowadays Devanagari script is also used for orthography.

Literature

magazine is a recent effort to maintain the language. The magazine uses Devanagari Script. There are publications, which generally describes the language.

Idioms

Status

The language is commonly called Pahari or Himachali. Some speaker may even call it a dialect of Punjabi or Dogri. The language has no official status. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the language is of critically endangered category, i.e. the youngest speakers of Pangwali are generally grandparents or older and they too speak it infrequently or partially.
The demand for the inclusion of 'Pahari ' under the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, which is supposed to represent multiple Pahari languages of Himachal Pradesh, had been made in the year 2010 by the state's Vidhan Sabha. There has been no positive progress on this matter since then even when small organisations are taking upto themselves to save the language and demanding it. Due to political interest, the language is currently recorded as a dialect of Hindi, even when having a poor mutual intelligibility with it and having a higher mutual intelligibility with other recognised languages like Dogri and other Western Pahari languages.