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Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) is a Dardic language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India.[2][3][4] It has about 4,391,000 speakers in India. The 105,000 or so speakers in Pakistan are mostly Immigrants from the Kashmir Valley to Pakistan and include only a few speakers residing in border villages in the Neelum District of Azad Kashmir.[1] Kashmiri belongs to the geographical linguistic sub-grouping called Dardic part of the Indo-European Language Family .[5] It is one of the 23 scheduled languages of India.[6]
It is a V2 word order language. Kashmiri has remained a spoken language up to the present times, though some manuscripts were written in the past in the Sharada script, and then in Perso-Arabic script. Currently, Kashmiri is written in either the Perso-Arabic script (with some modifications) or the Devanagari script. Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is practically unique, in that it regularly indicates all vowel sounds [7]
Kashmiri is the state official language of Jammu and Kashmir and also one of the national languages of India. Some Kashmiri speakers use English or Urdu as a second language.[1] In the past few decades, Kashmiri was introduced as a subject at the university and the colleges of the valley. At present, attempts are on for inclusion of Kashmiri in school curriculum.
In 1919 George Abraham Grierson wrote that “Kashmiri is the only one of the Dardic languages that has a literature”. Kashmiri literature dates back to over 750 years, this is, more-or-less, the age of many a modern literature including English.
