Gawri (گاؤری), also known asKalami (کالامی),Kalam Kohistani^[4] andBashkarik, is anIndo-Aryan language ofKohistani group spoken byGawri people in theSwat Kohistan region ofUpper Swat District and in the upperPanjkora river valley ofUpper Dir District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Gawri andTorwali are collectively classified as "Swat Kohistani".^[5]

According to its genealogical classification (Strand, 1973:302 and 2004), Gawri belongs to theKohistani subgroup of the north-western zone of Indo-Aryan languages, along with several closely related languages in its geographical vicinity: Torwali (in Swat, south of Kalam),Indus Kohistani,Bateri,Chilisso, and Gawro (the latter four east of Kalam in Indus Kohistan). Together with a range of other north-western Indo-Aryan mountain languages, these languages are sometimes collectively referred to as ‘Dardic languages.^[6]

Gawri is one of about thirty languages that are spoken in the mountain areas of northernPakistan. It is predominantly spoken in the valleys ofKalam,Usho andUtror in theUpper Swat District, and the six towns ofBarikot,Rajkot, Biar,Kalkot,Thal, and Lamuti in theKumrat Valley of theUpper Dir District.^[7]

Kohistan is a Persian word that means ‘land of mountains’ and Kohistani can be translated as ‘mountain language’. As a matter of fact, there are several distinct languages in the area that are all popularly called Kohistani. In the older linguistic literature, the language of Kalam Kohistan is referred to as Bashkarik (Morgenstierne, 1940), or as Garwi or Gawri (Grierson, 1919; Barth & Morgenstierne, 1958). These names are hardly, if at all, known to the speakers of the language themselves, who normally just call their language Kohistani. However, very recently a number of intellectuals belonging to a local cultural society have started to call their language Gawri, a name that has old historical roots.

Collectively, the two Gawri-speaking communities comprise 141,560 people as of 2025 estimates, of whom 35% are younger than the age of 15.^[2]

Gawri uses theArabic script. The Gawri alphabet has 43 letters: all 39 letters of theUrdu alphabet plus 4 additional letters. One feature of the Gawri alphabet not found in Urdu is that it places the letterھ as the last letter of the alphabet, preceded byے. All the 4 additional letters used in Gawri are also found inGawar-Bati language.

There are 7Aspirated consonants represented by digraphs with the letterھ:

• پھ (ph)
• تھ (th)
• ٹھ (ṭh)
• چھ (čh)
• ڄھ (ĉh)
• څھ (ch)
• کھ (kh)

The sounds/k/ and/g/ are palatalized beforeFront vowels.There are 3 digraphs with the letterن:

• نڈ (nḍ) pronounced /ɳɖ/
• نڑ (nṛ): pronounced /ɽ/
• نگ (ng): pronounced /ŋ/ and palatalized before front vowels.^[8]

Gawri language has 12 vowels (6 short and 6 long). They are:

• /a/ (a)
• /aː/ (ā)
• /æ/ (ä)
• /æː/ (ǟ)
• /i/ (i)
• /iː/ (ī)
• /u/ (u)
• /uː/ (ū)
• /e/ (e)
• /eː/ (ē)
• /o/ (o)
• /oː/ (ō)

8 of these vowels (a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ē, ō) have the same orthography as inUrdu. The vowelä (/æ/) is written with aZabar with two dots (ٞ) and the long version ǟ asٞا (آٞ at the beginning of a word).

Short e and o are represented by و, ی or ے followed byۡ.

Unlike in Urdu where vowel diacritics are optional, in Gawri they are mandatory.

Gawri is atonal language. It has 6 tones:

• level tone: unmarked.
• High tone: represented byٝ, romanized with acute accent.
• High Falling tone: represented byٛ, romanized with circumflex.
• low falling tone: represented byٔ, romanized with Caron.
• Low tone: represented byۧ, romanized with grave accent.
• Rising tone: represented byٚ, romanized with ◌̚.

Length (/ː/) andnasalization (/ ̃/) are probably contrastive for all vowels.

/qfzxɣ/ occur mainly inloanwords./qf/ tend to be replaced by/xp/, respectively.

After the front vowels/iea/, the velars/kɡŋ/ arepalatalized:[kʲɡʲŋʲ].

Gawri has contrastivetones.

The default sentence order isSOV, but this can be changed for emphasis.

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding missing information.(June 2008)

Approximately 50% of Gawri words can not be broken down to smaller morphological forms. Of the other half, most words are made up of about two to three morphemes. This language implements many modifications to the stem as opposed to using distinct morpheme additions. For example, many plural words are formed by changing the stem of words as opposed to modifying with a plural morpheme.^[9]

Words can also be modified by suffixes and prefixes.

This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding missing information.(April 2016)

• Indus Kohistani language

• Baart, Joan L.G. (2004)."Constrastive tone in Kalam Kohistani".Linguistic Discovery.2 (2).doi:10.1349/PS1.1537-0852.A.265.
• Baart, Joan and Muhammad Zaman Sagar. 2020. THE GAWRI LANGUAGE OF KALAM AND DIR KOHISTAN.Online access
• Zaman, S. M., & Baart, J. L. (2004). Gaawri zaban-o-adab (Inmal Haq Javed ed.). Islamabad: Department of Pakistani Languages, Allama Iqbal Open University.
• Stahl, J. L. (1988). Multilingualism in Kalam Kohistan.
• Rensch, C. R., Decker, S. J., & Hallberg, D. G. (1992). Patterns of languages use among the Kohistanis of the Swat Valley. Languages of Kohistan. Islamabad, Pakistan: National Institute of Pakistan Studies Quaid-i-Azam University.
• Lothers, M. D. (1996). Deixis in Kalam Kohistani narrative discourse.
• Barth, F., & Morgenstierne, G. (1954). Vocabularies and specimens of some S.E. Dardic dialects. Oslo: Universitets forleget
• Baart, J.L. (2006). Report on local names and uses of plants in Kalam Kohistan. FLI Language and Culture Series, Anthropology.
• Sagar, Muhammad Zaman; Malone, Susan (2025). "Establishing Multilingual Education Programs in Non-Dominant Language Communities". In Premsrirat, Suwilai;Hirsh, David (eds.).Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in the Asia-Pacific Region. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.ISBN 978-1-80041-974-2.

Gawri language test ofWikipedia atWikimedia Incubator

• Gawri Community Development Programme, contains various materials in and about the language
• The Gawri Language of Kalam and Dir Kohistan
• Tone and song in Kalam Kohistani
• A Sketch of Kalam Kohistani Grammar
• Names of Plants in Kalam Kohistani (Pakistan)
• The Gawri Language of Kalam and Dir Kohistani
• Kalam Kohistani Texts
• Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh
• LAPSyD Online page for Kalami
• SOCIOLINGUISTIC SURVEY OF NORTHERN PAKISTAN
• Endangered Languages Project

• Dardic languages
• Languages of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
• Tonal languages in non-tonal families

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• Language articles citing Ethnologue 18
• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Language articles with old Ethnologue 18 speaker data
• Language articles with Linguasphere code
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles to be expanded from June 2008
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• Articles to be expanded from April 2016