Linguistic Persecution in South Asia: Historical and Modern Implications for Post-Article 370 Kashmir
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2020
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Abstract
Koshur, also known as Kashmiri, is a Dardic language spoken primarily in the Kashmir
Valley of South Asia, the center of the international Kashmir conflict, in India-administered
Kashmir. It has about 7 million speakers globally, and at least 14 dialects (Eberhard, Simons, &
Fennig, 2019) though sociolinguistic research into the dialect distinctions is nearly nonexistent.
This is due to a variety of reasons, many of them politically charged and fraught with diplomatic
faux-pas. In this thesis, I will explore Kashmir’s and Koshur’s linguistic history and examples of
linguistic persecution and conflict in modern South Asia to compare them to Koshur’s current
standing. I will also discuss the lack of dialect-sensitive, objective research in Koshur’s
documentation and stress the urgency with which this research is needed. Additionally, I will
explore the treatment of the largest and starkest dialect split, which is between the co-dialects of
Koshur spoken by the Kashmiri Hindu and Kashmiri Muslim communities. While this split
encompasses many smaller sub-dialects and varieties, this split is the most obvious and
simultaneously least acknowledged.