Burushaski [buˈruɕaski]~[ˈbruɕaski] is a language isolate spoken by some 87,000 (as of 2000) Burusho people in the Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. Other names for the language are Kanjut (Kunjoot), Khaguna, Werchikwār, Boorishki, Brushas (Brushias). Kashmir (or Cashmere) may refer to: Kashmir region, the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent India, Kashmir conflict, the territorial dispute between India, Pakistan, and the China over the Kashmir region. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... A language isolate, in the absolute sense, 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. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... A language isolate, in the absolute sense, 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. ... Hunza Valley, looking towards Nagar Hunza Valley (Urdu: ہنزہ) is a mountainous valley near Gilgit in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. ... link title This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Yasin Valley is a high mountain valley in the Hindu Kush mountains, in the northwest region of Gilgit in northern areas (North Kashmir). ... Gilgit is a valley in Pakistan, carved by the Gilgit River. ... Kashmir (or Cashmere) may refer to: Kashmir region, the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent India, Kashmir conflict, the territorial dispute between India, Pakistan, and the China over the Kashmir region. ...

Today Burushaski contains numerous loanwords from Urdu (including English words received via Urdu) and from neighbouring Dardic languages such as Khowar and Shina, as well as a few from Turkic languages and from the neighboring Sino-Tibetan language Balti, but the original vocabulary remains largely intact. The Dardic languages also contain large numbers of loanwords from Burushaski. A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ... (, historically spelled Ordu), is an Middle Eastern-Aryan language. ... The Dardic languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages. ... Khowar is classified as a Dardic Language. ... Tshina is a Dardic Language and is spoken by majority of people in Northern Areas of Pakistan. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... The Sino-Tibetan languages form a putative language family composed of Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia. ... Balti is a language spoken in Baltistan, in what is now part of the Pakistan-controlled Northern Areas of Jammu & Kashmir State. ...

There are three dialects, named after the main valleys: Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin (also called Werchikwār). The dialect of Yasin is thought to be the least affected by contact with neighboring languages and is generally less similar to the other two than those are to each other; nevertheless all three dialects are mutually intelligible. Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. ...

Relationships

Attempts have been made to establish a genealogic relationship between Burushaski and Sumerian,^{[citation needed]} and the Caucasian, Dravidian,^{[citation needed]} and Indo-European^[1] language families; Burushaski is also part of the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis, along with Yeniseian, Caucasian, and Sino-Tibetan. However, none of these efforts have met with general acceptance. Sumerian ( native tongue) was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language in the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific... North Caucasian languages is a blanket term for two distinct, but possibly related, phyla of languages spoken in the north Caucasus and in Turkey. ... The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages[1] that are mainly spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan and Iran, and overseas in other countries such... The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... The Dené-Caucasian (also called Sino-Caucasian or Dené-Sino-Caucasian) language family is a proposed language superfamily containing at least the Basque, Caucasian, Yeniseian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dené languages. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... North Caucasian languages is a blanket term for two distinct, but possibly related, phyla of languages spoken in the north Caucasus and in Turkey. ... The Sino-Tibetan languages form a putative language family composed of Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia. ...

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 are supported by Grune (1998) and have recently been picked up by the linguist Roger Blench.^{[citation needed]} Another very important layer of the Burushaski language is allegedly the Indo-European. The linguist Ilija Čašule claims to have shown the existence of consistent and regular phonetic correspondences and highly specific semantic concordance with the ancient Balkan languages (most notably Phrygian and Thracian) and with Balto-Slavic. Leiden University, located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands[1]. It is a member of the Coimbra Group, the Europaeum and the League of European Research Universities. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... Karasuk is a language family proposed by George van Driem[1] of the University of Leiden that links the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia with the Burushaski language of nothern Pakistan. ... 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. ... Phrygian can refer to: A person from Phrygia The Phrygian language This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The Thracians were an Indo-European people, inhabitants of Thrace and adjacent lands (present-day Bulgaria, Romania, northeastern Greece, European Turkey and northwestern asiatic Turkey, eastern Serbia and parts of Republic of Macedonia). ... The Balto-Slavic language group is a reconstructed hypothethical language group consisting of the Baltic and Slavic language subgroups of the Indo-European family. ...

Following Berger (1956), Calvert Watkins, editor of the Indo-European etymologies in the American Heritage dictionaries, suggested that the word *abel (apple), the only name for a fruit (tree) reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski. (Today "apple" and "apple tree" are /balt/ in Burushaski.) Others, however, reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for "apple (tree)" as *mel-, while yet others don't think Proto-Indo-European had a word for "apple" at all and consider the different words of different Indo-European subgroups to be separate loans from different unidentified non-Indo-European languages. 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 comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ... Not to be confused with Entomology, the study of insects. ... The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is an American dictionary of the English language 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. ...

Writing system

Usually Burushaski is not written. Occasionally, the Urdu version of the Arabic alphabet is used, but a fixed orthography does not exist. Partawi Shah has written poetry in Burushaski in the Arabic alphabet. (, historically spelled Ordu), is an Middle Eastern-Aryan language. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing Arabic and various other languages, together with various closely related scripts that typically differ in the presence or absence of a few letters. ... 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.^{[citation needed]} Tibet (older spelling Thibet; Tibetan: བོད་; Wylie: Bod; Lhasa dialect IPA: [; Simplified and Traditional Chinese: 西藏, Hanyu Pinyin: XÄ«zàng; also referred to as 藏区 (Simplified Chinese), 藏區 (Traditional Chinese), ZàngqÅ« (Hanyu Pinyin), see Name section below) is a plateau region in Central Asia and the indigenous home to the Tibetan people. ... Bön has typically been described as the shamanistic religion in Tibet before the arrival of Buddhism in the 7th century C.E. With the recent exile of many Bönpo lamas to India, however, a more complex description of Bön is emerging and is now being considered by... 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. ...

Linguists working on Burushaski use various makeshift transcriptions based on the Latin alphabet, most commonly that by Berger (see below), in their publications. The Burushaski Research Academy, in cooperation with Karachi University, has recently published the first volume (A to C̣) of a Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary using this transcription. Karachi (Urdu: كراچى, Sindhi: ڪراچي) is the capital of the province of Sindh, and the most populated city in Pakistan. ...

Phonology

Burushaski primarily has five vowels, /i e a o u/. Various contractions result in long vowels; stressed vowels (marked with acute accents in Berger's transcription) tend to be longer and less "open" than unstressed ones ([i e a o u] as opposed to [ɪ ɛ ʌ ɔ ʊ]). Long vowels also occur in loans and in a few onomatopoeic words (Grune 1998). All vowels have nasal counterparts in Hunza (in some expressive words) and in Nager (also in proper names and a few other words).

In addition, Berger (1998) finds the following consonants to be phonemic, shown below in his transcription and in IPA: In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ...

Notes: In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... Sagittal section of alveolo-palatal fricative In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants are palatalized postalveolar fricatives, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate. ... Sub-apical retroflex plosive In phonetics, retroflex consonants are consonant sounds used in some languages. ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. ... Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some obstruents. ... A voiced consonant is a sound made as the vocal cords vibrate, as opposed to a voiceless consonant, where the vocal cords are relaxed. ... Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or, in a couple of languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel. ... Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... In phonetics, a voiceless consonant is a consonant that does not have voicing. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ...

• ¹ Pronunciation varies: [pʰ] ~ [p͡f] ~ [f].
• ² Pronunciation varies: [qʰ] ~ [q͡χ] ~ [χ].
• ³ The Yasin dialect lacks aspirated affricates and uses the plain ones instead.
• ⁴ Sometimes pronounced [ʑ].
• ⁵ Sometimes pronounced [ʐ].
• ⁶ Berger (1998) regards [w] and [j] as allophones of /u/ and /i/ that occur in front of stressed vowels.
• ⁷ This phoneme has various pronunciations, all of which are rare sounds cross-linguistically. Descriptions include: "a voiced retroflex sibilant with simultaneous dorso-palatal narrowing" (apparently [ʐʲ]) (Berger 1998); "a fricative r, pronounced with the tongue in the retroflex ('cerebral') position" (apparently [ɻ̝]/[ʐ̞], a sound which also occurs in Standard Mandarin, written r in Pinyin) (Morgenstierne 1945); and "a curious sound whose phonetic realizations vary from a retroflex, spirantized glide to a retroflex velarized spirant" (Anderson forthcoming). In any case, it does not occur in the Yasin dialect, and in Hunza and Nager it does not occur at the beginning of words.

Standard Mandarin – also known as Standard Chinese or Standard spoken Chinese – is the official Chinese spoken language used by the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore. ... Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ), commonly called Pinyin, is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ...

Grammar

Burushaki is a double-marking language and word order is generally Subject Object Verb. A double-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on both the heads (or nuclei) of the phrase in question, and on the modifiers or dependents. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...

Nouns in Burushaski are divided into four genders: human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable ones (similar to mass nouns). The assignment of a noun to a particular gender is largely predictable. Some words can belong both to the countable and to the uncountable class, producing differences in meaning: for example, when countable, /balt/ means "apple", when uncountable, it means "apple tree". (Grune 1998) Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... It has been suggested that Count noun be merged into this article or section. ...

Noun morphology consists of the noun stem, a possessive prefix (mandatory for some nouns, and thus an example of inherent possession), and number and case suffixes. Distinctions in number are singular, plural, indefinite, and grouped. Cases include absolutive, ergative/oblique, genitive, and several locatives; the latter indicate both location and direction and may be compounded. For other uses, see Morphology. ... Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, one of which possesses (owns, rules over, has as a part, has as a relative, etc. ... In linguistics, a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can attach. ... In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. ... In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In ergative-absolutive languages, the absolutive is the grammatical case used to mark both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. ... In ergative-absolutive languages, the ergative case identifies the subject of a transitive verb. ... An oblique case (Latin: ) in linguistics is a noun case of analytic languages that is used generally when a noun is the predicate of a sentence or a preposition. ... This article or section cites very few or no references or sources. ... Locative is a case which indicates a location. ...

Burushaski verbs have three basic stems: past tense, present tense, and consecutive. The past stem is the citation form and is also used for imperatives and nominalization; the consecutive stem is similar to a past participle and is used for coordination. Agreement on the verb has both nominative and ergative features: transitive verbs mark both the subject and the object of a clause, while intransitive verbs mark their sole argument as both a subject and an object. Altogether, a verb can take up to four prefixes and six suffixes. It has been suggested that Verbal agreement be merged into this article or section. ... It has been suggested that prohibitive mood be merged into this article or section. ... // Definition A nominalization is a word that has been changed from a verb or an adjective into a noun. ... In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, phrases, or clauses together. ... In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. ...

See also Grune (1998) and/or the German article on Burushaski which describe the grammar in detail.

Notes

The Paleo-Balkan languages were the Indo-European languages which were spoken in the Balkans in ancient times: Dacian language Thracian language Illyrian language Paionian language Ancient Macedonian language The only remnant of them is Albanian, but it is still disputed which language was its ancestor. ... 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 in South-Eastern Europe. ... The Balto-Slavic language group is a reconstructed hypothethical language group consisting of the Baltic and Slavic language subgroups of the Indo-European family. ...

Literature

• Anderson, Gregory D. S. 1997. Burushaski Morphology. Pages 1021–1041 in volume 2 of Morphologies of Asia and Africa, ed. by Alan Kaye. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
• Anderson, Gregory D. S. 1999. M. Witzel’s "South Asian Substrate Languages" from a Burushaski Perspective. Mother Tongue (Special Issue, October 1999).
• Anderson, Gregory D. S. forthcoming b. Burushaski. In Language Islands: Isolates and Microfamilies of Eurasia, ed. by D.A. Abondolo. London: Curzon Press.
• 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, Qaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics (1992), 31-54.
• Bashir, Elena. 2000. A Thematic Survey of Burushaski Research. History of Language 6.1: 1–14.
• Bengtson, John D. 1995. Basque: An orphan forever? A response to Trask. Mother Tongue 1: 84–103.
• Bengtson, John D. 1997. Ein Vergleich von Buruschaski und Nordkaukasisch [A comparison of B. and North Caucasian]. Georgica 20: 88–94.
• Bengtson, John D. 2000. Review of Čašule 1998. History of Language 6.1: 22–26.
• Bengtson, John D. 2001a. Genetic and Cultural Linguistic Links between Burushaski and the Caucasian Languages and Basque. (Paper presented at the 3rd Harvard Round Table on Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia, Harvard University, May 13, 2001.)
• Bengtson, John D. 2001. Review of H. Berger, Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nager. Mother Tongue 6: 184–187.
• Bengtson, John D. forthcoming. The Dene-Caucasian Lateral Affricates.
• Berger, Hermann. 1956. Mittelmeerische Kulturpflanzennamen aus dem Burušaski [Names of Mediterranean cultured plants from B.]. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 9: 4-33.
• Berger, Hermann. 1959. Die Burušaski-Lehnwörter in der Zigeunersprache [The B. loanwords in the Gypsy language]. Indo-Iranian Journal 3.1: 17-43.
• Berger, Hermann. 1974. Das Yasin-Burushaski (Werchikwar). Volume 3 of Neuindische Studien, ed. by Hermann Berger, Lothar Lutze and Günther Sontheimer. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
• Berger, Hermann. 1998. Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nager [The B. language of H. and N.]. Three volumes: Grammatik [grammar], Texte mit Übersetzungen [texts with translations], Wörterbuch [dictionary]. Altogether Volume 13 of Neuindische Studien (ed. by Hermann Berger, Heidrun Brückner and Lothar Lutze). Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz.
• Blažek, Václav, and Bengtson, John D. 1995. Lexica Dene-Caucasica, Central Asiatic Journal 39(1): 11–50 and 39(2): 161–164.
• Čašule, Ilija. 1998. Basic Burushaski Etymologies: The Indo-European and Paleo-Balkanic Affinities of Burushaski. LINCOM Etymological Studies 01. Munich: LINCOM Europa.
• Čašule, Ilija. Evidence for the Indo-European Laryngeals in Burushaski and its Genetic Affiliation with Indo-European
• van Driem, George. 2001. Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language (2 vols.). Leiden: Brill.
• Greenberg, Joseph H., and Merritt Ruhlen. 1992. Linguistic Origins of Native Americans. Scientific American 267(5): 94–99.
• Grune, Dick. 1998. Burushaski – An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains.
• Lorimer, D. L. R. 1935–1938. The Burushaski Language (3 vols.). Oslo: Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning.
• Morgenstierne, Georg. 1945. Notes on Burushaski Phonology. Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 13: 61–95.
• Пейрос, Илия [Peiros, Ilia]. 1988. Синокавказская теория и бурушаский язык [The Sino-Caucasian theory and the B. language]. Pages 214–227 in Проблемы изучения сравнителного-историческово языкознания и лингвистической истории о востоке и юге Азии. Moscow: Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
• van Skyhawk, Hugh. 2003. Burushaski-Texte aus Hispar. Materialien zum Verständnis einer archaischen Bergkultur in Nordpakistan. Beiträge zur Indologie 38. ISBN 3-447-04645-7.
• Starostin, Sergei A. 1996. Comments on the Basque-Dene-Caucasian Comparisons. Mother Tongue 2: 101–109.
• Tiffou, Étienne. 1993. Hunza Proverbs. University of Calgary Press. ISBN 1-895176-29-8
• Tiffou, Étienne. 1999. Parlons Bourouchaski. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 2-7384-7967-7
• Tiffou, Étienne. 2000. Current Research in Burushaski: A Survey. History of Language 6(1): 15–20.
• Tikkanen, Bertil. 1988. On Burushaski and other ancient substrata in northwest South Asia. Studia Orientalia 64: 303–325.
• Varma, Siddheshwar. 1941. Studies in Burushaski Dialectology. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Letters 7: 133–173.
• Witzel, Michael. 1999. Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages. Mother Tongue (Special Issue, October 1999): 1–70.

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. ... John D. Bengtson is a historical and anthropological linguist. ... North Caucasian languages is a blanket term for two distinct, but possibly related, phyla of languages spoken in the north Caucasus and in Turkey. ... Romani (or Romany) is the language of the Roma and Sinti, peoples often referred to in English as Gypsies. The Indo-Aryan Romani language should not be confused with either Romanian (spoken by Romanians), or Romansh (spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland), both of which are Romance languages. ... The Dené-Caucasian (also called Sino-Caucasian or Dené-Sino-Caucasian) language family is a proposed language superfamily containing at least the Basque, Caucasian, Yeniseian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dené languages. ...

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