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Concept
Kho people
Summary
The Kho (koʊ, ) or Chitrali people, are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group native to the Chitral District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts in Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan. They speak an Indo-Aryan language called Khowar.
The Kho people spread throughout Chitral from the northern part of the region, specifically from the Mulkhow and Torkhow Valley. According to Morgenstierne, the original abode of the Kho was northern Chitral in the valleys around Mastuj. The Kho started expanding into southern Chitral around the early 14th century under the Rais Mehtars. Later on, the Kho expanded eastwards into the Yasin and Ghizer valleys under the Khushwaqt dynasty in the 17th century.
In ancient times the Kho people practiced a faith akin to that observed by the Kalash today. In the 14th century, many of the Kho convered to Islam though some previous customs continue to persist. With respect to Islam, the Kho are primarily Hanafi Sunni Muslims although there exists a substantial population of Ismaili Muslims in the Upper Chitral region.
Khowar language
The Khowar language shares a great number of morphological characteristics with neighbouring Iranian languages of Badakhshan, pointing to a very early location of proto-Khowar in its original abode in Upper Chitral, although from its links with the Gandhari language, it likely came from further south in the first millennium BC, possibly through Swat and Dir.
The ethnologists Karl Jettmar and Lennart Edelberg noted, with respect to the Khowar language, that: "Khowar, in many respects [is] the most archaic of all modern Indian languages, retaining a great part of Sanskrit case inflexion, and retaining many words in a nearly Sanskritic form.”
Khowar is spoken by around 800,000 people in Pakistan. Most of the Kho people also use Urdu as a second language.
Many Kho believe that their customs and language is much more rich, polite, and sophisticated in comparison to the neighbouring Pashtuns.
Official source
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