Khowar alphabet

Khowar-Alphabets

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, Khowar newsletters and newspapers continued to be published from handwritten scripts by the Khowar authors until the late 1990s. The Monthly 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.

The Nasta'liq calligraphic writing style began as a Persian mixture of scripts Naskh and Ta'liq. Nasta'liq is more cursive and flowing than its Naskh counterpart.

A list of the letters of the Khowar alphabet and their pronunciation is given below. Khowar contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa both have two variants in Khowar: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for the sound [i], and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated and breathy voiced consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (to'e) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Khowar. Some of the original Arabic letters are not used in Khowar. This is the list of the Khowar letters, giving the consonant pronunciation. Many of these letters also represent vowel sounds.

Footnotes:

This is a list of Khowar vowels found in the initial, medial, and final positions.

Romanization	Pronunciation	Final	Medial	Initial
a	/ə/
ā	/ɑː/
i	/ɪ/
ī	/iː/
u	/ʊ/
ū	/uː/
e	/eː/
ai	/ɛ/
o	/oː/
au	/ɔ/