There are about 6.8 million speakers of Kashmiri and related dialects in Jammu and Kashmir state of Indiaand amongst the Kashmiri diaspora in other states of India,[11] and about 130,000 in the Neelam and Leepavalleys of Azad Kashmir, Pakistan.[12]
The Kashmiri language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India,[13] and is a part of the eighth Schedule in the constitution of the Jammu and Kashmir. Along with other regional languages mentioned in the Sixth Schedule, as well as Hindi and Urdu, the Kashmiri language is to be developed in the state.[14] Most Kashmiri speakers use Urdu or Englishas a second language.[1] Since November 2008, the Kashmiri language has been made a compulsory subject in all government schools in the Valley up to secondary level.[15]
Kashmiri is a fusional language[16] with verb-second (V2) word order.[17] Several of Kashmiri’s grammatical features distinguish it from other Indo-Aryan languages.[18]
Nouns
Kashmiri nouns are inflected according to gender, number and case. There are no articles, nor is there any grammatical distinction for definiteness, although there is some optional adverbial marking for indefinite or “generic” noun qualities.[19]
Gender
The Kashmiri gender system is divided into masculine and feminine. Feminine forms are typically generated by the addition of a suffix (or in most cases, a morphophonemic change, or both) to a masculine noun.[20] There is also a relatively small group of feminine nouns that have unique suppletionforms which are totally different from the corresponding masculine forms.[21] The following table illustrates the range of possible gender forms:[22]
There are five cases in Kashmiri: nominative, dative, ergative, ablative and vocative.[24] Case is expressed via suffixation of the noun.
Kashmiri utilizes an ergative-absolutive case structure when the verb is in simple past tense.[25]Thus, in these sentences, the subject of a transitiveverb is marked in the ergative case and the object in nominative, which is identical to how the subject of an intransitive verb would be marked.[26][27][28]However, in sentences constructed in any other tense, or in past tense sentences with intransitive verbs, a nominative-dative paradigm is adopted, with objects (whether direct or indirect) generally marked in dative case.[29]
Other case distinctions, such as locative, instrumental, genitive, comitative and allative, are marked by postpositions rather than suffixation
There are three orthographical systems used to write the Kashmiri language: the Sharada script, the Devanagari script and the Perso-Arabic script. The Roman script is also sometimes informally used to write Kashmiri, especially online.[2]
The Kashmiri language is traditionally written in the Sharada script after the 8th Century A.D.[67] This script however, is not in common use today, except for religious ceremonies of the Kashmiri Pandits.[68]
Today it is written in Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts (with some modifications).[69] Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is one of the very few which regularly indicates all vowel sounds.[70] The Kashmiri Perso-Arabic script has come to be associated with Kashmiri Muslims, while the Kashmiri Devanagari script has come to be associated with the Kashmiri Hindu community
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