Abstract
The group of Pahāṛī (‘mountain’) languages comprise the Indo-Aryan languages and dialects covering the foothills of the Himalayas and stretching from the Kashmir frontier in the west to central Nepal in the east. The most striking feature of the Pahari dialects is their obviously closer affinity with the Rajasthani dialects, rather than with the territorially immediately contiguous Hindi and Panjabi. At the same time, the Western Pahari dialects show certain common traits with the Dardic languages. According to G.A. Grierson, this links them to the bearers of the oldest Aryan stratum in the subcontinent, the Khasha or Khasa tribes, who settled here three thousand years ago, and who spoke IA languages closely related to those which later gave rise to the Dardic group. In spite of this close genetic relationship, however, the Pahari languages now show a distinct divergence, with innovations affecting all levels of the linguistic structure. In this respect, Nepali stands out as the language which, from the typological point of view, has most closely approximated to the languages of the eastern group.
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