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Hello! My name is Aakriti Khaibri. I live in Delhi, am 24 years old.

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I originally hail from Jammu, born into a Kashmiri family.

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My mother tongue is Kashmiri. I would be briefing on that in the next coupled of minutes.

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Kashmiri language has almost 56 lac speakers, over 56 actually.

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And It is influenced by Dard, Persian, and Sanskrit languages, this can be well observed from Kashmiri.

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Place and religion play a role too.

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Take the Hindustani word, 'paani' (water), for example.

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Kashmiri Muslims would call it 'aab', 'aab' being a Persian word.

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While Kashmiri Hindus call it 'poen', both 'paani' and 'poen' being similar sounding.

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Kashmiri is way different than the Hindustani language

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It is written in Nastaliq (Urdu) and Sharda scripts.

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Sharda is unfortunately not used as much.

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We generally use Devanagri for writing Kashmiri.

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Our Kashmiri Calendar (also called 'necshpatir' / 'janthri')

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has been written in Devanagri - the latest one.

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I feel we should work towards preserving our older languages, scripts, cultures.

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And educate the younger generations about our culture and values. Thank you!