Burushaski (ISO/DIS 639-3 bsk) is a language isolate spoken by some 50,000-60,000 Burusho people in the Hunza, Nagir, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan. Other names for the language are Kanjut (Kunjoot), Khaguna, Werchikwār, Boorishki, Brushas (Brushias). ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... A language isolate is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or genetic) relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language. ... The Burusho (or Burushas) are an ethnic group living in northeastern Pakistan, most of whom inhabit the Hunza Valley. ... This page is about the town of Hunza in northern areas of Pakistan. ... Gilgit is a region in the Northern Areas of Pakistan, bordering the Chinese region of Xinjiang. ...

Calvert Watkins, editor of the Indo-European etymologies in the American Heritage dictionaries, suggested that the word *abel (apple), the only fruit tree reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski. Calvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA. His doctoral dissertation was Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), which deeply reflected the structuralist approach of Jerzy Kurylowicz... The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred languages and dialects (443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and Southern Asia. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. ... The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. ...

Today Burushaski contains numerous loanwords from Urdu and a few from neighbouring Dardic languages such as Khowar and Shina, but the original vocabulary remains largely intact. The Dardic languages also contain large numbers of loan words from Burushaski. A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... The Dardic languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages. ... Khowar is classified as a Dardic Language. ... Shina is a Dardic Language spoken by 321,000 people in Gilgit in Northern Pakistan in Ishkoman and Yasin Valley and in parts of Hunza. ...

Classification

Attempts have been made to establish a genealogic relationship between Burushaski and Sumerian^{[citation needed]}, Basque, the Caucasian, Dravidian^{[citation needed]}, and Indo European^[1] language families; Burushaski has also traditionally been part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis, along with Yeniseian and Sino-Tibetan. However, none these efforts have met with general acceptance. The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BC. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD. Then, it... Basque (in Basque: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ... The term Caucasian languages is loosely used to refer to a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than 7 million people in the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. ... The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 26 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, and eastern and central India. ... The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred languages and dialects (443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and Southern Asia. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... The Dene-Caucasian (or Sino-Caucasian) language family is a conjectural macrofamily containing the Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Yeniseian, Basque and Na-Dene languages. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, second only to Indo-European in terms of the number of speakers. ...

Recently George van Driem at Leiden University revived links between Burushaski and Yeniseian in a language family he calls Karasuk. He believes the Burusho took part in the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indian sub-continent, while other Karasuk peoples migrated northwards to become the Yenisei. These claims have recently been picked up by linguist Roger Blench. Leiden University in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... The Karasuk culture is a name given by archaeologists to a group of Bronze Age societies who lived in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan during the later second millennium BC. They succeeded the Andronovo culture in this region and were farmers who primarily raised sheep and may have been the first... The Indian subcontinent is the peninsular region of larger South Asia in which the nations of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka as well as parts of Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and some disputed territory currently controlled by China are located. ...

Literature

There are three dialects of Burushaski: those used in Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin. The dialect of Yasin is thought to be the most pure (least affected by contact with neighboring languages), but the literary and most popular dialect is that of Hunza. The language was seldom written for centuries; today it uses a modified version of the Arabic script, and Partawi Shah has written poetry in Burushaski. Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ... Prof Dr Allamah Nasir al-Din Nasir Hunzai, is one of the highly acclaimed men of wisdom and prolific writers of Islam. ...

Tibetan sources record a Bru-sá language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski. The Bru-sá are credited with bringing the Bön religion to Tibet and Central Asia, and their script is alleged to have been the ancestor of the Tibetan alphabet. Thus Burushaski may once have been a significant literary language. However, no Bru-sá manuscripts are known to have survived. Tibet (older spelling Thibet; Tibetan: བོད་, Bod, pronounced pö in Lhasa dialect; Chinese: 西藏, Pinyin: XÄ«zàng or Chinese: 藏区, Pinyin: ZàngqÅ« [the two names are used with different connotations; see Name section below]) is a region in Central Asia and the home of the Tibetan people. ... Bön has typically been described as the shamanistic religion in Tibet before the arrival of Buddhism in the 7th century. ... The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. ... A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. ...

The Burushaski Research Academy submitted the first volume of their Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary to print on 31 October 2005. October 31 is the 304th day of the year (305th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 61 days remaining, as the final day of October. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Phonology

There are various phoneme inventories attributed to Burushaski by different scholars. In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ...

* Liquids are glides and laterals.

Notes

The Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, a people who probably migrated from Thrace to Asia Minor in the Bronze Age. ... The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Balto-Slavic languages are an Indo-European language family, consisting of the (possibly genetically related) Baltic languages and Slavic languages. ...

References

• Backstrom, Peter C, "Burushaski" in Backstrom and Radloff (eds.), Languages of northern areas, Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 2. Islamabad, National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics (1992), 31-54.
• Blazek, V. and Bengtson, D., Lexica Dene-Caucasica, Central Asiatic Journal 39 (1995), 11-50, 161-164.
• van Driem, George, Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language Leiden: Brill: (2001, 2 vols.).
• van Skyhawk, Hugh, Burushaski-Texte aus Hispar. Materialien zum Verständnis einer archaischen Bergkultur in Nordpakistan, Beiträge zur Indologie, 38, Wiesbaden: (2003), ISBN 3-447-04645-7.

SIL International is a non-profit, faith-based, scientific organization with the main purpose to study, develop and document lesser-known languages for the purpose of expanding linguistic knowledge, promoting world literacy and aiding minority language development. ...

See also

• Partawi Shah

Prof Dr Allamah Nasir al-Din Nasir Hunzai, is one of the highly acclaimed men of wisdom and prolific writers of Islam. ...

External links

• SIL Ethnologue entry
• Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains (PDF)
• Ilija Casule publications on Thraco-Phrygian and Balto-Slavic connections of Burushaski