Burushaski Language

Burushaski language, also spelled Burushaki or Burushki, language spoken primarily in the Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin valleys of northern Pakistan. It is estimated to have some 90,000 speakers. Burushaski is a linguistic isolate, a language whose genetic relationship to other languages is not yet clear. In this respect it is like Basque, a language spoken in the western Pyrenees of Spain and France.

Burushaski’s linguistic features include four genders. These can be broadly distinguished as male humans; female humans; animals (undifferentiated by sex) plus inanimate objects that are quantifiable; and abstract items and objects. In terms of number, Burushaski inflection includes plural suffixes for nouns, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns; third-person endings for verbs, which also vary according to gender; a class of pronominal prefixes; and ergative constructions in which the transitive verb shows agreement with its object rather than its subject. Numbers up to 1,000 are based on multiples of 20 and 40.

The language has no standard writing system, though a modified Perso-Arabic system has been used since the 1940s. There is no written literary tradition, but a number of oral traditions have been collected. Burushaski continues to be a language of self-identification among its speakers.