DARDIC LANGUAGES

also called Dard, Pisaca, or Pisacha Languages, group of closely related Indo-Iranian languages spoken in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They are often divided into three subgroups: Kafiri, or Western; Khowari, or Central (spoken in the Chitral district of northwestern Pakistan); and the Eastern group, which includes Shina and Kashmiri. (Some scholars use the term Dardic to refer only to the Eastern subgroup of languages and use the name Pisaca to refer to the group as a whole.) The exact position of the Dardic languages within the Indo-Iranian language family has been a matter of dispute among scholars. Some scholars believe the languages to stem from an undifferentiated stage of Indo-Iranian; others believe the Eastern and Khowari groups to be Indo-Aryan, with the Kafiri subgroup being separate. Kashmiri is the only Dardic language that has been used extensively for literary purposes. Except for Shina, the languages of the Eastern subgroup have been radically changed by the influence of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken farther south. The Dardic languages differ from the other Indo-Iranian languages in their sound systems and in the preservation of a number of words lost in India and Iran after the time of Vedic Sanskrit.