The Kalasha language

Kalasha is the language of the Kalash, the people of three valleys in Chitral, in the far north-west of Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language, one of the mountain languages loosely called Dardic, and its nearest relative is Khowar, the main language of Chitral. Pakistan's 2023 census counted 7,466 people who speak it as their mother tongue. Its first alphabet books were printed in 1994, and since 2001 it has been written in a Roman alphabet that its own teachers and elders chose.

There is a second Kalasha. In the Waygal valley of Nuristan, over the mountains in Afghanistan, the books give the same name to a different language, Kalasha-ala. People in Waygal call it Waygali-ala, and it is our mother tongue. It is a Nuristani language, not an Indo-Aryan one, and a speaker of one Kalasha cannot follow the other. This page is about the Kalasha of Chitral: how linguists classify it, who speaks it, how it came to be written, its dialects and how endangered it is. Then it sets the two Kalashas side by side, with a short word list, because the shared name causes real confusion, not least for anyone looking for a translator.

Kalasha is spoken in the Kalash valleys of Lower Chitral: Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir, which run west from the Chitral river up towards the Afghan border, and Urtsun to the south, where the speech has changed most.

Pakistan's census of 2023 counted 7,466 people whose mother tongue is Kalasha. That is more than the estimates linguists had worked with before it, which ran from three to five thousand.

Kalasha changes a little from valley to valley. Glottolog divides it into a north-western Kalasha, in which Rumbur and Bumburet count as one variety and Birir as another, and a southern Kalasha, the speech of Urtsun. The 2021 description of the language's sounds is of the speech of Bumburet.

Even the word for language differs. In one form it is mon and in another mandr, which is why the language's own name appears both as Kalasha-mun and as Kal'as'amondr.

The southern speech has moved furthest. In the twentieth century the Kalash of Urtsun shifted to a form of Kalasha strongly influenced by Khowar, which is known as Urtsuniwar.

In the Waygal valley of southern Nuristan, over the mountains in Afghanistan, there is another Kalasha. Linguists call its language Kalasha-ala, or Nuristani Kalasha, and older books call it Waigali. In Waygal we call it Waygali-ala. Ala means language, and mon means language in Kalasha, so Kalasha-ala and Kalasha-mun both say the same thing, the Kalasha language, each in its own tongue.

They are different languages. Kalasha-ala is Nuristani, in the southern group of that family with Ashkun and Tregami, while the Kalasha of Chitral is Indo-Aryan. Richard Strand divides Kalasha-ala into the speech of the Väi of the upper valley, around Waygal village, and that of the Čima-Nišei of the lower valley, around Nishigram. A speaker of one Kalasha cannot follow the other, although people in Waygal hear the kinship when the Kalash speak.

Why the same name? The word Kalasha is older and wider than either language. Wolfgang Lentz, who was in Nuristan with a German expedition in 1935, heard it used for the people and language of the Waygal valley and, more loosely, for neighbouring tribes as well, and thought it had no connection with the Kalash of Chitral. Richard Strand thinks a group of Kalasha from Waygal crossed into lower Chitral in the fifteenth century, set up a ruling line there and gave the people their name. Samiullah Taza, a native speaker of Kalasha-ala, counts the Kalasha as one of the large tribes of the Nuristani nation, taking in the people of Waygal, of the Ashkun country and of Wama, and counts the Kalash of Chitral as historically part of it.

Because the books use one name for two languages, the confusion is practical as well as scholarly. Some linguists have tried to keep them apart by the word for language, Kalasha-mon for Chitral and Kalasha-ala for Waygal; others write Nuristani Kalasha and Indo-Aryan Kalasha. When someone asks for a Kalasha translator, the first question is which Kalasha they mean.

We are native speakers of Waygali-ala, the Kalasha-ala of Waygal, and that is the Kalasha we translate and interpret: documents, voice messages and recordings, and interpreting in person anywhere in the UK or by telephone and video. We do not speak the Kalasha of Chitral. For that language you need a speaker from Bumburet, Rumbur or Birir.

If you have a recording and are not sure which Kalasha it is, send it to us and we will tell you whether it is ours.