The National.ae, 7 January 2017
Peshawar // About 100 women gathered in a community centre in Peshawar, the heart of Pakistan’s fabled north-west, are conversing in a dialect incomprehensible to the Pashtun ethnic group that dominates the region and whose language is Pashto.
Instead they are exchanging anecdotes and ideas in their native Hindko – literally, "the language of India" – at a conference organised to promote the increasingly marginalised language.
It is one of 72 tongues, including the official languages Urdu and English, spoken by Pakistan’s 200 million people, according to a 2014 parliamentary paper that classed 10 as either "in trouble" or "near extinction".
According to scholars, Hindko’s decline as the foremost language of Peshawar city began in 1947 when Hindu and Sikh traders left after the partition of British India. Read more...