Nuristani
Sign in to savelanguage group of the Indo-Iranian language family
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Nuristani is a group of languages spoken in the Nuristani region of Afghanistan that belongs to the Indo-Iranian language family. These languages are linguistically significant because they represent a distinct branch within Indo-Iranian that had been isolated for centuries, making them valuable for understanding the history and diversity of language families across South and Central Asia.
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The Nuristani languages, known earlier as Kafiri languages, are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages. They have approximately 214,000 speakers, primarily in Nuristan and Kunar provinces in northeastern Afghanistan and a few adjacent valleys in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Chitral District in Pakistan. The region inhabited by the Nuristanis is located in the southern Hindu Kush mountains and is drained by the Alingar River in the west, the Pech River in the center, and the Landai Sin and Kunar rivers in the east. More broadly, the Nuristan region is located at the northern intersection of the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau.
The Nuristani languages were not described in literature until the 19th century. The older name for the region was Kafiristan, due to the pre-Islamic religious practices of its residents, but this term has been abandoned in favor of Nuristan ("land of light"), after the region's inhabitants converted to Islam.