Around a hundred women have gathered in a community centre in Peshawar, the heart of Pakistan’s fabled northwest -- but they are conversing in a dialect incomprehensible to the Pashtun ethnic group that dominates the region.
Instead they are exchanging anecdotes and ideas in their native Hindko (literally, “the language of India”) at a conference organised to promote the increasingly marginalised language.
Pakistan’s 200 million people speak 72 provincial and regional tongues, including official languages Urdu and English, according to a 2014 parliamentary paper on the subject that classed 10 as either “in trouble” or “near extinction”.
According to scholars, Hindko’s decline as the foremost language of Peshawar city began in 1947 when Hindu and Sikh traders left the city after the partition of British India.
Known for its curious aphorisms such as “Kehni aan dhiye nu, nuen kan dhar” (“I’m talking to my daughter, my daughter-in-law should listen”) -- which is meant to convey a harsh message but indirectly), it only has some two million speakers across Pakistan as opposed to Pashto’s 26 million.
It has also become a minority language in the city of its birth.