Hello! My name is Aakriti Khaibri. I live in Delhi, I am 24 years old.
I originally hail from Jammu, born into a Kashmiri family.
My mother tongue is Kashmiri. I would be briefing on that in the next couple of minutes.
Kashmiri language has almost 56 lac speakers, over 56 actually.
And it is influenced by Dard, Persian, and Sanskrit languages; this can be well observed from Kashmiri.
Place and religion play a role too.
Take the Hindustani word, 'paani' (water), for example.
Kashmiri Muslims would call it 'aab', 'aab' being a Persian word.
While Kashmiri Hindus call it 'poen', both 'paani' and 'poen' being similar sounding.
Kashmiri is way different than the Hindustani language
It is written in Nastaliq (Urdu) and Sharda scripts.
Sharda is unfortunately not used as much.
We generally use Devanagri for writing Kashmiri.
Our Kashmiri Calendar (also called 'necshpatir' / 'janthri')
has been written in Devanagri - the latest one.
I feel we should work towards preserving our older languages, scripts, cultures.
And educate the younger generations about our culture and values. Thank you!