Dameli Language

Dameli Language

Dameli is a language spoken by approximately 5,000 people in the Domel Valley, in the Chitral District of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.

The Domel or Damel Valley is about ten miles south of Drosh Tehsil on the East Side of the Chitral River, on the road from the Mirkhani Fort to the pass of Arandu.

The main source of information on the Dameli Language is an article by Georg Morgenstierne, published in 1942: Notes on Dameli: A Kafir-Dardic Language of the Chitral. A sociolinguistic survey written by Kendall Decker (1992) contains a chapter on Dameli. The language is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one.

Dameli is still the main language in the villages where it is spoken, and is regularly learned by children. Most of the men speak Pashto as a second language, and some also speak Khowar and Urdu but there are no signs of massive language change.

The Norwegian Linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote that Chitral is the area of the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Although Khowar is the predominant language of Chitral, more than ten other languages are spoken here. These include Kalasha-mun, Palula, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gujar, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persian and Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu or Persian.