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Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is a multilingual area where languages belonging to different language families are found. Apart from major languages like Kashmiri, Dogri, there are multitude of minority languages like Shina, Burushaski, Balti, Hindko, Punjabi, Pahari, Pashtu, Gojri, etc. Gurezi Shina is a lesser-known variety of Shina language being spoken by inhabitants of Gurez, a remote northern valley in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The Shina Language belongs to the Dardic sub-group of Indio-Aryan language family. This language is primarily spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, Dah Hanu, Gurez and Dras in India. The alternate names of the language are Shinaki and Sina. The linguistic repertoire of the native speakers of Gurezi Shina mainly comprises of languages like Shina, Kashmiri, Urdu and English. This paper focuses on the domain analysis that is the domains where Shina is used and the domains where other languages are used. By looking at language use in different domains one can get an idea whether there are any particular linguistic preferences for different domains and different interlocutors. The data for the present study was elicited through a well-designed questionnaire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research reports the grammatical gender Shina speakers assign to English loanwords while using Urdu. Irrespective of their proficiency level, the current study selected those multilingual Shina speakers who could communicate in Shina, Urdu and English. Urdu and Shina make use of grammatical gender, whereas English is generally devoid of it. Some synonymous words in Shina and Urdu have the same gender while others have different gender. The focus of the study was on the issue of assigning gender to gender-neutral English borrowed/loanwords in Urdu. The 'variation theory' put forward by Poplack (1993) in the study of language contact phenomena with reference to borrowing was used as the theoretical framework for the present study. For the sake of data collection, survey method was employed and the questionnaire prepared for the purpose was administered among the respondents (n: 50). It was done by firstly taking into account the equivalent words of English loanwords which have the same gender in both languages, since gender to the English loanwords is not assigned randomly rather it primarily corresponds to the gender of their equivalent words in Shina and Urdu; secondly, by considering the words which have different gender in Shina and Urdu as it has been observed that majority of Shina speakers assign the gender of Urdu equivalent words to the loanwords. Thirdly, the study investigated the gender Shina speakers assign to the English loanwords which lack equivalent words in Shina and Urdu and it was found that there was no identifiable pattern though most of the words were treated as feminine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the question of whether mirative meaning, in the sense of Aksu-Koç and Slobin’s (1986) “unprepared mind” and DeLancey (1997), is grammatically encoded in the Dardic language Shina. Mirativity marking in Shina’s linguistic neighbors is examined and compared with the situation in Shina. I find a clustering of what appears to be morphologically indicated mirativity in the eastern dialects of Shina, and identify two morphological strategies which can be employed to encode mirativity.

Swat has it peculiar historical, geographical, and cultural position. It is a place where various cultures and civilizations developed. Many ethnic and linguistic groups are living in Swat. Presently, nine different indigenous languages are spoken in Swat. Besides these indigenous languages Urdu as national langufranca and English as international languafranca is also spoken to some extent. These nine indigenous languages include Pukhto (Pashto), Gujro (Gujri), Torwali, Gawri, Ushojo, Qashqari, Badeshi, Shina Kohistani, and Westren dialect of Kohistani. Among these languages the Ushojo and Badeshi are endangered languages. All of the languages spoken Swat have a common cultural background. This shared cultural background is the main cause of linguistic commonalities. Religion, national language, media, education system and many other factors created these linguistic commonalities. Pashto being language of the majority and market play a role of linguafranca among various linguistic groups of Swat. That is why Pashto language and Pashtun culture has also influenced these indigenous languages and cultures. This article attempts to introduce languages spoken in Swat along with shared cultural background of these languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shina is an endangered Indo-Aryan (Dardic) language spoken in Gilgit, Northern Pakistan. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates of Shina’s three-way stop laryngeal contrast across five places of articulation. A wide range of acoustic correlates were measured including fundamental frequency (F0), spectral tilt (H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, and H1*-A3*), and cepstral peak prominence (CPP). Voiceless aspirated stops were characterized by higher fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence, compared to voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated stops. These results suggest that Shina is among those languages which have a raising effect of aspiration on the pitch and spectral tilt onsets of the following vowels. Positive correlations among fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence were observed. The findings of this study will contribute to the phonetic documentation of endangered Dardic languages.

The present study aims at exploring the phonological and morpho-syntactic traits of Gurezi, which is a dialect of Shina language. The Shina language, itself belongs to the Dardic sub-group of Indo-Aryan language family. This language is primarily spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, Dah Hanu, Gurais and Dras in India. The alternate names of the language are Shinaki and Sina. The language shows its various speech varieties such as Gilgiti, Astori, Chilasi, Kohistani, Drasi, Gurezi, Jalkoti, Kolai and Palasi. The Gurezi dialect of Shina is spoken in the Gurais region of Kashmir in the Republic of India. As far as the phonology of Gurezi Shina is analysed, it comprises of segmental vowel phonemes, suprasegmental phonemes and consonant phonemes which are described in the paper. The morphology of Shina language is also examined while taking the Nouns, numbers, pronoun, gender, and case suffix into consideration. The data for the research is purely descriptive and it has been compiled because of a number of field trips to the valley of Gurez. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some novel and hard-to-access data from Kalkoti, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in northern Pakistan. The particular focus is on showing how this Shina variety in a relatively short time span has drifted apart from its closest known genealogical relatives and undergone significant linguistic convergence with a Kohistani variety in whose vicinity Kalkoti is presently spoken. Among other features, we explore what seems like an ongoing process of tonogenesis as well as structural ?copying? in the realm of tense and aspect.