The Pamir languages are an areal group of Eastern Iranian languages spoken by communities in the Pamir Mountains, chiefly along the Panj River and its tributaries in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province and Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, with further speakers in China's Xinjiang region and Pakistan's Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan areas; older Western scholarship called them the Ghalchah languages, a term no longer used. The group has about 100,000 speakers in total and is considered endangered, divided into four main subgroups: Shughni-Yazghulami (about 250,000 speakers by some counts, though overall totals vary by source), Wakhi (about 58,000), Munji-Yidgha (about 11,000) and Sanglechi-Ishkashimi (about 2,500). The Pamir languages share subject-object-verb word order but do not otherwise form a single well-defined genetic subgroup within Eastern Iranian.
Facts
RegionBadakhshan Province, Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, Tajikistan 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusNo single proto-language established; no features uniting the Pamir languages as one subgroup of Iranian have been demonstrated 1 Sources
1. Pamir languages, Wikipedia
Geographic distribution section
The Pamirian languages are spoken primarily in the Badakhshan Province of northeastern Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of eastern Tajikistan.
Status section
The language group is endangered, with the total number of speakers roughly around 100,000 in 1990.
Classification section
No features uniting the Pamir languages as a single subgroup of Iranian have been demonstrated.
View the SourceReader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.