Prasun, the language of the Parun valley

Prasun is the Nuristani language of the Parun valley, the high valley at the top of the Pech basin where the provincial capital stands. Its speakers call themselves Vasi and their language Vasi-vari. Prasun is what the Kati call them, Paruni is the Persian name of the valley, and the old books wrote Presun, Viron, Wasi-weri. Richard Strand calls it the most aberrant of the Nuristani languages: its sounds changed so far from the common stock that speakers of the other four have virtually no comprehension of it, and Georg Buddruss, who spent sixty years on it, described it as the most isolated, most difficult and least adequately known of the Nuristan languages.

It is spoken in six villages strung along about twenty kilometres of the Parun river, mostly on its right bank, between roughly 2,500 and 2,850 metres, by somewhere between three and eight thousand people depending on who is counting and when. Until 1896 these villages were the religious heart of old Kafiristan, and since 1993 the lowest of them, Pashki, has been the seat of the province. On 20 July 2026 a flash flood came down the valley and through Parun town. This page is about the language; the flood has a page of its own.

Prasun is one of the five Nuristani languages, which together form a third branch of the Indo-Iranian family beside Iranian and Indo-Aryan, a position Morgenstierne argued for from 1926. Where Prasun sits within the five has changed with the evidence. Morgenstierne in 1974, and Strand on his website from 1997 and in the Encyclopaedia Iranica in 2000, paired it with Kati in a northern group on the strength of shared sound changes, while Strand noted in the same breath that Prasun had been isolated from the developments the core languages share. Glottolog now gives Prasun a primary branch of its own, with lower, central and upper Prasun under it, and groups Kati with Ashkun and Waygali-ala.

Strand himself came round to that view. In a paper given at Rome in 2022 and published in 2023 he proposed eliminating the northern Nuristani subgroup altogether. His reasoning is worth a lay summary: the vowel-dropping that Prasun and Kati share happened at different stages and in more places in Prasun, so it cannot be a change inherited from a common ancestor; and when Degener gave him the full Prasun lexicon from the Harvard volumes, he found that eighteen per cent of the 1,406 words with known origins were borrowed from Kati, the common language of the province, which is one reason Prasun and Kati had seemed closer than they are. No Prasun word, by contrast, has been recorded as a loan in any other Nuristani language, because almost nobody outside the valley speaks it. In most measures, he concludes, Vasi-vari stands out from the rest of the family.

Strand goes further and reads the names Vasi and Prasun as hither Sakas and further Sakas, descendants of the ancient steppe people, which would make the Vasi a different strand of the Nuristani story from the Kati-speaking Kambojas. That is one scholar's new proposal, published in 2023 and not yet weighed by others, and we present it as such. The older tradition, which Strand also records, is simply that the Nuristanis came up from the plains fleeing Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century and that the Vasi, being less powerful, ended up in the highest and least desirable valley.

Robertson's visit in 1891 was too short, as Klimburg says, for more than a few observations and a description of the temple, and he recorded of the language only that it was quite different from the Wai's and the Siah-Posh's. The first study was Morgenstierne's The Language of the Prasun Kafirs, published in the Norwegian journal of linguistics in 1949, nearly a hundred and fifty pages, and Strand credits it with working out the sound changes set out above. The German expedition of 1935 had already recorded the Prasun calendar, an exceptionally detailed order in Klimburg's words, which Wolfgang Lentz published in 1939.

Then came Georg Buddruss of Mainz. A member of the German Hindu Kush expedition of 1955, he collected texts in the Parun valley in 1956 and again in 1970, prose and a few songs, and spent the rest of a long life working them up. When he applied for funding in 2012, in his eighties, he described a language with almost nothing certain known about its grammar. With Almuth Degener he published Materialien zur Prasun-Sprache des afghanischen Hindukusch in two parts in the Harvard Oriental Series: the texts and glossary in 2015, 946 pages, with lists of numbers, place names, personal names and the calendar, and the grammar in 2017, 507 pages, covering the verb, subordination, mirativity and what the publisher calls the complicated system of directional morphemes. It is the first comprehensive grammar of Prasun and the most detailed description of any Nuristani language in print. Buddruss died in Mainz on 13 August 2021, aged ninety-one. Peter Snoy had printed short versions of his Prasun myths as early as 1962, and Buddruss's own analysis of a Prasun text about the god Mara building a mill appeared in 2005.

Strand visited the valley in August 1973 and recorded conversations with Zaman Khan, leader of the Pazgam clan of Shupu, the family that had been the keepers of the creator god before Islam; the interviews were in Kamviri, because that was the language they shared. Degener supplied the Prasun numerals to the Max Planck database in 2013 and the lexicon to Strand for his 2023 study, and Julian Kreidl of Indiana published new Prasun etymologies in 2024. The Danish botanist Lennart Edelberg, who worked in the valley from the 1940s, published Paruni myths and hymns in 1972 and the temple of Imra in 1959, and Klimburg wrote up the arts and culture of Parun, Kafiristan's sacred valley, in 2002.