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Concept
Pamir languages
Summary
The Pamir languages are an areal group of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by numerous people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pamir language family was sometimes referred to as the Ghalchah languages by western scholars. The term Ghalchah is no longer used to refer to the Pamir languages or the native speakers of these languages.
One of the most prolific researchers of the Pamir languages was Soviet linguist Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin.
The Pamirian languages are spoken primarily in the Badakhshan Province of northeastern Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of eastern Tajikistan.
Pamirian languages are also spoken in Xinjiang and the Pamir language Sarikoli is spoken beyond the Sarikol Range on the Afghanistan-China border and thus qualifies as the easternmost of the extant Iranian languages.
Wakhi communities are also found in the adjacent Chitral District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Gojal, Gilgit Baltistan in Pakistan.
The only other living member of the Southeastern Iranian group is Pashto.
No features uniting the Pamir languages as a single subgroup of Iranian have been demonstrated. The Ethnologue lists the Pamir languages along with Pashto as Southeastern Iranian, however, according to Encyclopedia Iranica, the Pamirian languages and Pashto belong to the North-Eastern Iranian branch.
Members of the Pamirian language area include four reliable groups: a Shughni-Yazgulyam group including Shughni, Sarikoli, and Yazgulyam; Munji and Yidgha; Ishkashimi and related dialects; and Wakhi. They have the subject-object-verb syntactic typology.
Václav Blažek (2019) suggests that the Pamir languages have a Burushaski-like substratum. Although Burushaski is today spoken in Pakistan to the south of the Pamir language area, Burushaski formerly had a much wider geographic distribution before being assimilated by Indo-Iranian languages.
The Shughni, Sarikoli, and Yazgulyam languages belong to the Shughni-Yazgulami branch.
Official source
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