History and Origin
During the pre-Islamic era in present day Pakistan, the language of the masses was refined by the ancient grammarian Pāṇini, who set the rules of an ancient language called Sanskrit which was used principally for Hindu scriptures (analogous to Latin in the Western world). Meanwhile, the vernacular language of the masses, Prakrit developed into many tongues and dialects which spread over the northern parts of South Asia. Hindko is believed to be closely related to Prakrit. It has undergone very little grammatical corruption, but has borrowed considerable vocabulary from its neighbours, in particular Pashto. It shows close affinity to Lahnda sub-group of Indo-Aryan tongues and can be sub-divided into a northern and southern dialect (the southern dialect shows some similarity with Saraiki as opposed to Punjabi). The language is mutually intelligible with other Lahnda dialects such as Pothwari.
Read more about this topic: Hindko Language
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“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
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