Published September 8, 2018
This video was recorded by Tushar Rakheja in Delhi and features Kashmiri speaker Aakriti Khaibri. Kashmiri was spoken in India by roughly 5,360,000 according to a 2001 census. Kashmiri is part of the Dardic subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages belonging to the Indo-European language family, and is spoken primarily in the Kashmir and Chanab Valleys of Jammu and Kashmir. Many Kashmiri speakers use Urdu or English as a second language. Kashmiri is a fusional (synthetic) language and contains many features and lexemes of Old Indo-Aryan that have been lost in other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi. Kashmiri orthography is split along three forms: the Sharada script, the Devanagari script, and the Perso-Arabic script.