Khowar

Khowar, also known as Chitrali, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic subgroup spoken primarily in the Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. It belongs to the Northwestern subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages and is associated with the Kho people. The language has distinctive phonology and morphology and a rich tradition of oral literature and poetry.

Khowar is written in a modified Perso-Arabic script used for everyday writing and local publications. The script includes additional letters to represent sounds not found in Urdu, and it is often referred to as Khowar Perso-Arabic. Persian, Arabic, and other loanwords are common due to long-standing cultural contact, while the core vocabulary remains native to Khowar.

There are several regional dialects across Chitral, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Estimates of the number of speakers range in the hundreds of thousands, concentrated in Chitral and nearby areas, with smaller diaspora communities in major Pakistani cities.

Khowar is not an official language of Pakistan but is used in local education, media, and cultural contexts to varying degrees. It forms part of language preservation and literacy efforts in the region, with literature, poetry, and folklore continuing to play an important role in community life. It is designated by the ISO 639-3 code khw.