Ormuri

Ormuri is an Iranian language belonging to the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Glottolog classifies it within the Ormuri-Parachi subgroup of Iranian languages. Despite being spoken in the eastern part of the Iranian language area, Ormuri and Parachi share some common islogloss and linguistic and structural features with some Northwestern Iranian languages, such as Zaza, Semnani, Sangsari. Language status According to the Endangered Languages Project, the language of Ormuri is highly threatened. The language is used for face-to-face communication, however it is losing users. ==History==

The Ormuri language is used by the Ormur/Baraki tribe in parts of the Kaniguram Valley in Waziristan, Pakistan. The language is also used in a small part of Logar Province, Afghanistan. Ormuri tribe An alternate name used by the Ormur people is Baraki. It is believed that there were eight to ten thousand families in the Logar area at the beginning of the 19th century and approximately four to five hundred families in Kaniguram at the beginning of the 20th century. The Ormur tribe does not occupy an ethnically homogeneous territory. In Afghanistan, the Ormur people live in mixed communities with both Tajiks and Pashtuns. Whereas, in Pakistan, the Ormur people live only with the Pashtuns. ==Geographic distribution==

Ormuri is spoken primarily in the town of Kaniguram in South Waziristan, Pakistan. A small population also speaks it in the town of Baraki Barak in Logar Province, Baraki area in Kabul Afghanistan. The language is sustained by nearly fifty adherents in Afghanistan and around five to six thousand speakers in Pakistan and provinces Dialects There are two dialects of Ormuri; one is spoken in Kaniguram, Waziristan, which is the more archaic dialect, and the other one in Baraki-Barak, Logar. The Kaniguram dialect is not understood in Baraki-Barak. The linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote: The dialect of Kaniguram is currently strong, spoken by a relatively prosperous community of Ormur in an isolated part of the rugged Waziristan hills. However, the position of the dialect of Baraki Barak is not strong. Morgenstierne wrote he was told that: Lexical differences Differences in phonetic forms The vowel system of Ormuri is characterized as heterogenous. The language consists of a subsystem of vowels that found native within Ormuri vocabulary, as well as a subsystem of vowels that is considered "borrowed vocabulary." The differences seen between the Logar and Kaniguram dialects are mainly based on the quality of vowels instead of the quantity. The system is based on six phonemes: i, e, a, å, o, u. The consonant system varies slightly between both the dialects of Kaniguram and Logar. The Logar native consonant system contains 25 phonemes, while the Kaniguram system has 27. == Phonology ==

Consonants Source: Vowels • Only in Kaniguram. • Only in Logar. Syllabic Patterns Proper Ormuri words will have the following syllabic patterns: V, VC, CV, CCV, (C)VCC, CVC, CCVC, CCVCC. Both dialects from Kaniguram and Logar have similar syllabic structure. Examples • a 'this' • (w)un 'so much' • pe 'father' • gri 'mountain' • åxt 'eight' • måx 'we' • spok 'dog' • breš 'burn' • broxt 'burned, burnt' • wroxt 'beard' At the end of certain words CC occurs as spirant/sonant + occlusive. When separating most words into syllables, a medial CC will be divided: • al-gox-tok 'to fall' • kir-ží 'hen' • er-zåk 'to come' == Morphology ==

The language has undergone extensive change in comparison to its ancestral self. For nominal morphology (nouns, adjectives, and pronouns), aspects of the Kaniguram dialect of grammatical gender has completely been lost in the Logar. In terms of the verbal morphology, there is a greater variety of conjugations of modal and tense-aspect forms based on the present-tense stem. There is also a distinction made between masculine and feminine words based on the past-tense system. Finally, there is a greater number of distinctions between within the system of tense-aspect forms and there are different types of ergative constructions. There is a developed system of noun and verb inflections. Nominal parts of speech contains: Three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and the verb has two voices (active and middle). There is the elimination of the category of case (loss in nouns, adjectives, numerals, and certain pronouns). There is also a complete loss of the category of gender, varying on the dialect (Complete loss in Logar and rudimentary masculine and feminine forms remain in Kaniguram). In Logar most original Ormuri nouns and adjectives have a simple stem ending in a consonant and a few nouns end in unstressed (or rarely stressed) -a or -i. Whereas in Kaniguram, the stem usually ends in a consonant, but both nouns and adjectives may end in -a or -i. == Orthography ==

Ormuri uses the Pashto script with the additional letters ' /r̝/, /ʑ/ and ' /ɕ/ : ==Examples==

will represent examples from the Ormuri dialect of Logar and will be used to signify the Kaniguram dialect of Ormuri ====== • Afo kåbol-ki altsok. → 'He went off to Kabul.' • A-saṛay dzok šuk. → '[This] man has been beaten.' • Xodåay-an bad-e badtarin såton → 'O God, keep us from misfortune.' () ====== • A-nar by pa mun ǰoṛawak sa. → 'The house is being built by me.' • Sabā su az kābul-ki tsom. → 'Tomorrow I shall probably go to Kabul.' • Tsami a-dāru irwar! → 'Bring my eye drops!' == Resources ==

• Ormuri Primer • Qawaid e Bargistā (in Hindustani) • The Ormuri Language in Past and Present • Linguistic Survey of India (Volume 10): Ormuri at pages 123 to 325 • Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages (Volume 1): Parachi and Ormuri • Clitics of Ormuri ==See also==