The fading tongues of the Chenab Valley

Jammu and Kashmir’s Chenab Valley, a mountainous region carved deeply by the River Chenab between the Lesser and Outer Himalayas, is home to remarkable linguistic diversity. Yet, across generations, many of its native languages and their dialects are gradually fading from everyday speech.Kishtwar, one of the larger districts of Jammu and Kashmir, illustrates this complex picture. Hindus of the town and the Mandal area speak Kishtwari, while many local Muslims speak dialectal variants of Kashmiri, and the people of Padder speak Padri. The rest of the region shows similar diversity: Sirazi (also known as Sarazi) is spoken in the Saraz area of Doda; Bhaderwahi and Bhalesi are rooted in Bhaderwah and Bhalessa; and Pogli is spoken in parts of Ramban. Together, these languages and dialects make up the varied linguistic landscape of the Chenab Valley.This diversity is tied to the Valley’s geography and history. Its scattered settlements and relatively isolated valleys allowed different speech communities to develop distinct traditions over generations. At the same time, migration, intermarriage, trade, and interaction between neighbouring communities created a more complex picture. Linguistic studies describe the Chenab Valley as one of the most diverse regions of Jammu and Kashmir, where communities share cultural features while retaining separate linguistic identities.Their classification remains a difficult problem. Linguists distinguish these varieties through vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and historical relationships, but official categorisation tends to fold small dialects into majority-speaking languages. The 2011 Census, for instance, lists Bhaderwahi and Padri under Hindi, and Kishtwari and Sirazi under Kashmiri. Such administrative categorisation can obscure the region’s finer linguistic diversity and make it difficult to assess the vitality of an individual mother tongue.However, a language’s presence on a regional map does not guarantee its survival in daily life. The decline of Kishtwari, Padri, Sirazi, and Bhalesi raises urgent concerns as younger generations increasingly favour Kashmiri, Urdu, or Hindi.Census data from 2001 to 2011 show an uneven trajectory for these languages. The number of Sirazi speakers rose from 46,302 to 77,362, while Kishtwari speakers grew from 33,399 to only 39,636. Padri recorded 17,265 speakers, though a 2018 news report estimated that the number had dropped to below 15,000.These figures can be misleading about a language’s true vitality. As Veena Gupta, retired professor of Dogri at the University of Jammu, explains, rising numbers often reflect the official inclusion of smaller sub-dialects into broader majority-language categories. And, crucially, raw headcounts do not reveal how frequently a language is spoken at home or whether it is being passed on to children.Language loss rarely begins with the death of the last fluent speaker; it begins much earlier, when a mother tongue stops being passed from one generation to the next. A similar generational shift is visible in Paddar. While grandparents continue to speak Padri among themselves, their children increasingly use Urdu or Kashmiri in everyday conversation. The younger generation has even less exposure, turning what was once a household language into something associated mainly with older relatives. “We are not conversant in Padri, but our parents were,” says a native of Padder, now living in Kishtwar town. “Because we spent less time in the village and more in town, we understand Padri but speak Kashmiri. Our children, meanwhile, neither understand nor speak it.”The pattern is different in Kishtwar town, where Kishtwari has not been transmitted uniformly across communities. Among many Muslim families in the town, Kashmiri has remained the language of everyday communication across generations, meaning Kishtwari was not necessarily spoken by parents or grandparents in the first place. Adnan, a Class 12 student from Kishtwar town, says, “Kashmiri has always been the language spoken at home,” not Kishtwari.Classroom, careerThat shift is reinforced in the classroom. Children have limited access to formal textbooks and teaching material in many of the region’s smaller languages. Languages with greater institutional presence, in contrast, have a more established place in education material. Syed Asma, a teacher, points to both parental aspirations and the medium of instruction as factors in this transition. “Parents encourage their children to speak English because they see better career opportunities in it. At the same time, teachers should use local languages to bridge the gap with students’ mother tongues and help them understand what is being taught.”This pattern recurs with Sirazi, spoken from Kishtwar’s Kuntawara area to Ramban’s Parshala belt. Mukesh Parihar, a native of Gundna and chairman of the Jammu Kashmir Lumberdar and Chowkidar Union, attributes Sirazi’s decline to urban migration driven by education and jobs, compounded by social stigma. “There is a persistent inferiority complex among Sirazi speakers,” he says.Despite these pressures, subtle efforts to assert linguistic identity persist. Outside the native villages of Saraz, several restaurants and businesses now prefix their names with “Sirazi”. This public visibility offers a morale boost and helps chip away at the stigma attached to the dialect.Formal preservation, however, faces steep structural hurdles. Parihar attempted to launch a Sirazi newspaper a few years ago but had to abandon the project because the language lacks a standardised written system. Without that, and without vocabulary, grammar, textbooks, and regular publications, a language remains heavily dependent on oral transmission. Sirazi has a limited body of published literature, while much of its linguistic and cultural knowledge continues to exist through speech, memory, and tradition.

Mukesh Parihar tried to launch a Sirazi newspaper but could not, as the language lacks a standard script. | Photo Credit: Ayaan Saroori What disappears with a language is not limited to vocabulary. Folk songs, wedding traditions, proverbs, oral histories, and local expressions are among the cultural forms that can become vulnerable as intergenerational transmission weakens. When a language weakens, this knowledge may survive only in fragments, or become difficult for younger generations to understand in its original cultural context.The language spoken in the Pogal Paristan area of Ramban district also shows a decline in speakers, following a similar pattern of migration to cities. Savinder Singh, a native of the area, says the decline was gradual at first, though the underlying factors have remained the same. “Due to migration, we are losing our mother tongue as well as culture,” he says. Testimonies from Padri- and Pogli-speaking communities point to a similar pattern. The general shift from active communication to passive comprehension—where young people understand their heritage language but cannot, or choose not to, speak it—suggests that time is running out.A small counterpointJammu and Kashmir’s Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has a wider mandate to preserve and promote the region’s linguistic and cultural heritage, but the smaller Chenab languages need more systematic documentation. Dictionaries, grammar, and teaching material could give an institutional boost to languages whose transmission still depends on families and oral tradition.The rise of digital media offers a small counterpoint to this decline. Internet use has created new spaces for speakers to circulate linguistic and cultural material, and content in Sirazi, Bhaderwahi, and Pogli has begun appearing on various platforms, giving speakers a chance to share and create a record of these languages. Yet much of the online content consumed in the region remains in Hindi, Urdu, or Kashmiri. The challenge, then, is to turn social media from a space of linguistic replacement into one of linguistic preservation.To save these mother tongues from extinction, the Chenab Times Foundation (CTF), a trust working in the cultural and journalistic spheres, continues to lobby the Jammu and Kashmir government to develop formal curricula and textbooks for the Valley’s smaller dialects under the National Education Policy 2020 framework. The foundation also addresses the threat of linguistic extinction through its Multilingual News Initiative, which produces news in local languages. Such community-led efforts show that preservation need not remain confined to government institutions; it can also emerge from within the communities themselves.The experience of Santhali offers a contrasting instance of how institutional and community effort can strengthen a language. For decades, Santhali was written in different scripts, including Bengali, Roman, Odia, and Devanagari, none of which had been designed to accurately represent its phonetic features. In 1925, Pandit Raghunath Murmu developed the Ol Chiki script specifically for Santhali, giving it a dedicated writing system that subsequently became a vehicle for literature and education. Santhali was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003. Its gradual movement from a predominantly oral tradition towards a more established and institutional presence suggests that a language’s continuity can be strengthened when community initiative is accompanied by scripts, education, literature, and institutional recognition.Preserving the languages of the Chenab Valley does not require isolating these communities from broader societal multilingualism. Instead, it demands fostering cultural pride, developing writing systems, and actively choosing to speak these languages at home. Without deliberate effort, these heritage tongues risk disappearing quietly behind the Himalayan peaks.Ayaan Saroori is a freelance writer who writes on politics, environment, society and law, and reviews books.Also Read | The Chenab Times attempts to preserve Bhaderwahi and Sarazi in Jammu & KashmirAlso Read | Reservation in Jammu and Kashmir: Youth discuss merit, marginalisation, and jobs