Speakers
The largest geographically contiguous group of Hindko speakers is concentrated in the districts of Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra, Attock of Pakistan, while there are a substantial number of speakers of Hindko in cities like Peshawar, Nowshera, Swabi and Kohat of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province of Pakistan and parts of both Kashmirs.
People who speak Hindko are referred to by some academics as Pathans because of the many Pashtun tribes, for example Shilmani/Sulemani, Mashwanis, Jadoon, Tareen, Tanolis, who settled in places like Hazara, adopted Hindko as their first language and gained political power in these areas during the British rule, and also because of many ethnic Pashtuns such as Kakar, Durrani, Popalzai, Sadozai, Bangash, Khattak, Yousafzai, Ghaznavi and Khogyani, etc. who speak Hindko as their first language in Peshawar and Kohat are Pashtuns by origin. The Hindko speaking people living in major cities Peshawar, Kohat, Nowshera, and Attock are bilingual in Pashto and Hindko. Similarly there are Pashto speaking people in districts like Abbottabad and Mansehra (especially in Agror Valley and northern Tanawal) who have become bilingual in Pashto and Hindko.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Imperial Gazetteer (1905) refers to the language as Hindko. More than one interpretation has been offered for the term Hindko. Some associate it with Hindustan (as the word may have been used during the medieval Muslim period in the Indian subcontinent), others with the Indus River which is of course the etymological source of all these terms. Farigh Bukhari and South Asian language expert and historian Christopher Shackle believe that Hindko was a generic term applied to the Indo-Aryan dialect continuum in the northwest frontier territories and adjacent district of Attock in the Punjab province to differentiate it from Pashto.
Linguists classify the language into the Indic subgroup of Indo-European languages and consider it to be one of the Indo-Iranian languages of the area. An estimated 2.4 per cent of the total population of Pakistan speak Hindko as their mother tongue, with more rural than urban households reporting Hindko as their household language.
Read more about this topic: Hindko Language
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