Khowar alphabet
| Khowar |
|
|---|---|
| Type |
Abjad
|
| Languages | Khowar, Balti, Burushaski, others |
|
Time period
|
early 20th century - present |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
U+0600–U+06FF U+0750–U+077F |
|
The Khowar alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Khowar language. It is a modification of the Urdu alphabet, which is itself a derivative of the Persian alphabet and Arabic alphabet. According to the Khowar Academy with 60 letters, the Khowar alphabet is typically written in the calligraphic Nasta'liq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly in the Naskh style. Usually, bare transliterations of Khowar into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin script. The Khowar Academy of Pakistan has developed a number of systems with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but these can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Khowar, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:ژ خ غ ط ص or ق and Hindi for letters such as ڑ.
The Khowar language developed during the rule of Mehtar of Chitral State.Since the early twentieth century Khowar has been written in the Khowar alphabet, which is based on the Urdu alphabet and uses the Nasta'liq script. Prior to that, the language was carried on through oral tradition. Today Urdu and English are the official languages and the only major literary usage of Khowar is in both poetry and prose composition. Khowar has also been occasionally written in a version of the Roman script called Roman Khowar since the 1960s. Despite the invention of the Khowar typewriter in 1996 by Rehmat Aziz Chitrali, Khowar newsletters and newspapers continued to be published from handwritten scripts by the Khowar authors until the late 1990s. The Montly Zhang is the first newsletter was the first Khowar newspaper to use Nasta’liq computer-based composition. There are efforts under way to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Khowar support on computers and the internet. Nowadays, nearly all Khowar newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Khowar software programs.
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