This book containing 15 Torwali folktales was published in 2015 by IBT under its project “Preservation and Promotion of Torwali Language and Culture”. The folktales were collected, edited and translated in Urdu and English by Rahim Sabir.
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This is a trilingual dictionary published by IBT in 2015 under the project ‘Preservation and Promotion of Torwali Language and Culture’. The dictionary was complied by Aftab Ahmad in a year after having more than 20 workshops in the Torwali community. This was the first trilingual dictionary based on Torwali. Now work on its online…
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Music is a cultural construct, and culture refers to a set of behaviours, beliefs, social structures, and technologies of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. It includes social conventions related to art, dress, manner, religion, morality, ritual, dance and music. Alan Merriam (1964) describes three aspects to music: sound, behaviour, and…
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A Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family, Torwali is spoken in the Bahrain and Chail areas of District Swat in Northern Pakistan. According to some estimates the Torwali people count themselves more than 120,0001 while recent research counts the number of speakers of the Torwali language around 130,0002. ‘Possibly half of them live in the…
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Introduction: The Torwali Language According to the online database of the languages spoken in the world, The Ethnologue (Simons, & Fennig, 2018), there are currently around 7,097 languages spoken in the world. Linguists predict that by the end of this century, more than half of these languages will be extinct, resulting in the loss of…
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The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim Dardic communities of Pakistan (Viaro & Inam-ur-Rahim, 2002). The people who speak the language are called Torwalik or Torwal (Grierson, 1929). The area where Torwali is spoken is also known as Torwal by other Dardic communities like Gawri and Kohsitani. In Torwali folk literature, the entire…
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The area where Torwali is spoken is also known as Torwal by other Dardic communities like Gawri and Kohsitani. In Torwali folk literature, the entire area is referred to Tu:aal (Torwal); for example, in this Torwali couplet: Du zar Tu:aal hu shid egi Saidu si Bachaa, Thamurd Jaen Chi Dherina wa ni hi yi Panah” (Torwali,…
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This was the current initiative carried out by IBT with the indigenous communities of Chitral, Gilgit Baltistan, Indus Kohistan, Swat and Dir where these communities negotiate pluralism and find out strategies and knowledge as how to address the challenges of potential for conflicts based on culture or faith. 1. https://www.dawn.com/news/1407766 2. https://www.dawn.com/news/1413183 3. https://wemountains.com/05/17/666/
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In early 2011, in Islamabad, IBT arranged a seminar with 25 language communities of northern Pakistan wherein challenges and threats to these languages were discussed and highlighted. The seminar was the first of its kind in Pakistan. In the aftermath of the seminar we now witness such discourse in mainstream Pakistan.
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This conference was the complementary approach of IBT which has been striving for the integration and cohesion of these indigenous communities for the larger goal of human development, dignity and prosperity of these communities. In this conference representatives of 18 indigenous communities of northern Pakistan participated. At the end of the day they agreed to…
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