Dameli is a language spoken by less than 5,000 people in the remote valley of Damil-Nisar, in the Chitral District of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. Chitral, or Chitrāl, is the name of a town (35° 53 N; 71° 48 E), valley, river, district, and former princely state in the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. ... North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) is geographically the smallest of the four provinces of Pakistan. ...

Damil-Nisar is about ten miles south of Drosh on the East Side of the Chitral River. Damil-Nisar leads to a mountain pass which crosses the high Hindu Raj Mountains and could form an important link from Chitral to Dir in Pakistan, but is rarely used because the people of Damil are regarded as wild and untamed and much given to robbing and killing passing travelers, or so they say.

The Dameli Language has not been given study by serious linguists, except that it is mentioned by George Morgenstierne (1926) and Kendall Decker (1992). It is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one. The Dardic languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages. ...

Dameli is believed to be a dying language, as most speakers are converting to the more widelty spoken Khowar language. Khowar is classified as a Dardic Language. ...

Books

• Khowar English Dictionary (by Mohammad Ismail Sloan, 1981) (published in Pakistan)

• Decker, Kendall D. (1992) Languages of Chitral http://www.ethnologue.com/show_work.asp?id=32850

• Morgenstierne, Georg (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo.