WIKITONGUES: Aakriti speaking Kashmiri

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This video was recorded by Tushar Rakheja in Delhi and features Kashmiri speaker Aakriti Khaibri. Kashmiri was spoken in India by roughly 5,360,000 according to a 2001 census. Kashmiri is part of the Dardic subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages belonging to the Indo-European language family, and is spoken primarily in the Kashmir and Chanab Valleys of Jammu and Kashmir. Many Kashmiri speakers use Urdu or English as a second language. Kashmiri is a fusional (synthetic) language and contains many features and lexemes of Old Indo-Aryan that have been lost in other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi. Kashmiri orthography is split along three forms: the Sharada script, the Devanagari script, and the Perso-Arabic script.

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!