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Abstract

This paper investigates lexical convergences between Gawri and Shina, two under-documented Dardic languages spoken in Northern Pakistan. While Dardic languages constitute a significant subgroup of the Indo-Aryan family, their internal relationships remain insufficiently explored (Morgenstierne, 1961; Rönnqvist, 2013). By focusing on Gawri and Shina, this study addresses a critical gap in comparative lexical analysis and contributes to broader debates on language contact, classification, and change in Central Eurasia’s mountainous borderlands.

Using a comparative qualitative approach, the research analyzes everyday semantic domains—kinship, body parts, nature, household objects, numbers, and basic verbs—to identify phonological, semantic, and morphological correspondences. Special attention is given to cognates, borrowings, and local innovations that illuminate historical connections and sociolinguistic influences (Kohistani, 2008; Jacquesson, 2004).

Preliminary findings suggest that Gawri and Shina share a substantial proportion of vocabulary, reflecting both shared ancestry and sustained contact, while also exhibiting divergences shaped by geography and community-specific developments. These results underscore the dynamic interplay between linguistic continuity and innovation in the region.

By situating lexical analysis within the broader context of cultural identity and historical memory, this study highlights the importance of documenting indigenous languages as repositories of collective heritage. It contributes to the conference theme by demonstrating how spaces (mountainous borderlands), societies (linguistic communities), and power (language preservation and identity politics) intersect in shaping Central Eurasia’s linguistic landscape.

Keywords

Lexicon, Dardic languages, Gawri, Shina, language contact, Northern Pakistan

Suggested References

• Morgenstierne, G. (1961). Dardic Languages. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

• Kohistani, R. (2008). Lexical Sharing of Shina Kohistani and Other Dardic Languages. Archive.org.

• Jacquesson, F. (2004). Les langues indo-iraniennes des Pamirs et de l’Hindou Kouch. Cahiers d’Asie centrale.

• Rönnqvist, H. (2013). Tense and Aspect Systems in Dardic Languages: A Comparative Study. Uppsala University.

• Grierson, G.A. (1919). Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages. Linguistic Survey of India.

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Abstract

Legacy language materials: field notes, transcriptions, and audio recordings created by earlier generations of researchers, occupy a privileged position in the study and revitalization of endangered languages. When a language is no longer transmitted to children, when remaining speakers are elderly and few, and when contemporary speech is visibly marked by contact-induced change and domain restriction, materials collected decades earlier inevitably come to be perceived as capturing something more "complete," more "authentic," more "true." This perception is shared, though for different reasons, by linguists seeking diachronic baselines and by community members seeking an uncompromised model for revitalization.

This paper argues that the purity attributed to legacy materials is an ideological construction that obscures the cumulative mediations inherent in any archival record. Drawing on the Tomsk Field Archive of Siberian Indigenous Languages - a collection of over 180 volumes of handwritten field notes covering eight languages across four genetic groupings, assembled over four decades of systematic documentation beginning in 1947, I trace five categories of mediation, what I term "degrees of separation," between the archived record and the communicative events it purports to represent. These include the interpretive filtering inherent in real-time field transcription, the systematic smoothing introduced through secondary editing and "cleaning," the analytical choices embedded in notation normalization, the structural transformations imposed by digital rendering, and the epistemic flattening that occurs when legacy and contemporary data are integrated into undifferentiated multimedia databases.

Using Irvine and Gal's (2000) framework of language ideology, I show how two semiotic processes sustain the perception of archival purity. Iconization collapses the distinction between the archive and the language it documents, such that the collection comes to stand for the language itself. Erasure renders the successive mediations invisible, stripping legacy materials of their production history and presenting them as transparent windows onto a past linguistic reality. Together, these processes generate a paradox: the most heavily mediated version of the data, the one furthest removed from original speech events, carries the greatest institutional authority.

The paper concludes by drawing out implications in three domains: source-critical research practice, including a proposal for systematic "mediation metadata"; meaningful Indigenous data governance under the CARE Principles, with attention to the specific constraints of the Russian institutional context; and a broader reconsideration of archival purity as an ideological phenomenon that shapes not only how legacy materials are used but how "language" itself is conceptualized in documentary and revitalization work.