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| Mirpuri پوتوری |
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| Spoken in: | Pakistan: Areas of Pakistani administered Kashmir, Rawalpindi, United Kingdom. | |
| Total speakers: | 4,680,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Northern zone Western Pahari Mirpuri |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | none | |
| ISO 639-3: | phr | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Pothwari or Pothohari language in Urdu otherwise known as Potwari is an Indo-European language spoken from the Potwar district around Rawalpindi, Pakistan to the Cease-fire Line (LoC) of Indian administered Kashmir de-facto border in the Mirpur district of the Jammu area in Pakistan administered Kashmir. It is closely related to Punjabi and Romani (Gypsy), but is distinct from these languages.
There is some dialect continuum with Hindko and the Jhelumi dialect of Panjabi. Pothohari speakers may understand Panjabis both from India and Pakistan, but these groups may not understand Pothohari - the reason being that Panjabi is the second-most spoken language in the subcontinent as a whole and in both India & Pakistan respectively whilst Pothohari is highly concentrated in the North of Pakistan. Also, Punjab and Kashmir ("the crown" and "jewel", so to speak, of the subcontinent) have always shared strong links on several levels - trade, nobility & neighbourhood.
Every language is a "mongrel" language to some degree or another. Pothohari is no different, with the majority of its modern-language roots being connected to Panjabi primarily and Romani (Gypsy).
Prevalence
Pothohari is the second largest language of Kashmir after Kashmiri.
In the UK, over 90% of British Pakistanis speak Pothohari as their first language. Over 2/3 of these originate from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir (the area of Kashmir under Pakistani administration).
Every second Muslim in Britain speaks Pothohari as their first language. Every third South Asian person in Britain is a Pothohari speaker.
‘Aapna Channel’ is the first ever TV channel in the Pothohari language. The core audience of Apna Channel is the second largest linguistic group in the United Kingdom after English.
