UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION
(Pakistan)
Received: winter 2006; last update: summer 2008
Brief description:
This report describes a dictionary project concerning the formerly unwritten language Torwali in Pakistan. The project has contributed to the documentation and standardization of the language as well as to empowering and raising awareness in the community in question.
Torwali belongs to the Kohistani sub-group of the Indo-Aryan Dardic languages and has two dialects (the Bahrain and Chail dialects), with a total of approximately 80,000 to 90,000 speakers. Close to half of the population of the
Bahrain and Chail Valley communities has migrated to bigger cities such as
Hyderabad, Karachi and Quetta, where language shift is a frequent phenomenon.
This present project comprises the compilation and translation of the lexicon of the Torwali language in a Torwali-English-Urdu dictionary. This dictionary project is an individual initiative by a hobby linguist-lexicographer from within the Torwali speech community. So far, over 5,000 headwords have been collected. Entries are compiled with the help of other community members and in consultation with them. Lexicography expertise (e.g. regarding methodology, organization and software use) has been provided by academic experts working in the area. The dictionary is now web-accessible. The database also includes over 4,000 Torwali example sentences with respective digital audio-recordings. Work is ongoing.
The dictionary project has caused the Torwali community to take more pride in its linguistic and cultural heritage; in its course, the Torwali ‘Association for
Education and Development’ was formed and further related safeguarding projects are now being undertaken.

UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION
Reader’s guide:
This project provides an example of how a single person can make a difference in language preservation, inciting interest and activities in his community. The genesis, development and methodology of the dictionary are described in detail, particularly with regard to changes made over time arising from the fact that the project was not initially designed according to a master-plan. Activities coming out of the original dictionary project are described as well. The report is thus illustrative of how an attitude change towards a feeling of pride in one’s linguistic heritage is a strong motor in safeguarding a language in a local community ‘on the ground’, underlining the high value of grassroots initiatives.
Contact information:
Project contact and author of the report:
Inam Ullah
Bahrain, Swat, NWFP, Postal Code 19010,
Pakistan torwalpk@yahoo.com
1. INTRODUCTION
Background: current situation in the language community:
Torwali is one of at least twenty-four lesser-known languages of northern
Pakistan, many of which remain largely unwritten and have had little exposure in the international academic community. Smaller groups or individuals strive to preserve and document their mother tongues; however, due to a lack of national language policy and support, it is mostly foreign researchers who take it upon themselves to explore and analyze these languages.
Torwali is an endangered language, as it has a small community of speakers
(80,000-90,000), and close to half its speakers have migrated permanently to the bigger cities of Pakistan where their language is being replaced by Urdu, the national language, or by other languages of wider communication such as Pashto.
Further, tourism in the Torwali-speaking homeland exposes the language to linguistic encroachments and, as the language has no writing tradition, it is particularly vulnerable.
Impetus for the project:
It was during his studies at the University of Peshawar that the project initiator,
Inam Ullah, a mother-tongue speaker of Torwali, first became curious about written materials on his language. The materials he found on the languages of
Northern Pakistan contained a lot of semantic and phonetic errors. This initially motivated him to work on his native language in order to present it more accurately to the academic community.
Later, Inam Ullah decided to compile a dictionary of Torwali, based on the idea that dictionaries can be a crucial resource for language learning and instruction, particularly with regard to endangered languages. A good dictionary can serve
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION many purposes at the same time, as it can address issues of orthography, documentation and language preservation.
When the project was initiated, very few people supported the effort. Most of the project initiator's friends ridiculed the project and thought it a futile effort. Torwali was commonly said to have no political or economic scope as the language of a small population living in the mountains. Furthermore, the locals thought that it was impossible to write the language due to the presence of some peculiar sounds that were not represented in the alphabets of neighbouring regional languages or the national language.
2. PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Area/ type of project:
The Torwali-English-Urdu Dictionary Project is a local language documentation and standardization initiative carried out by a hobby lexicographer from within the speech community. The project comprises the compilation and translation of the lexicon of the Torwali language, with the help and consultation of the community.
The dictionary's digital version is hosted by the University of Chicago and can be accessed at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/torwali/ .
An entry in this digital dictionary consists of a Torwali word written using a phonetic transcription similar to the ‘Standard Orientalist’ used by many linguists researching in the area. The entry is followed by its written form in Torwali script
(Perso-Arabic modified through the addition of characters to represent Torwali sounds not present in Urdu or Persian). An English gloss of the word follows, and in some cases an Urdu gloss. Next, an abbreviation indicates the grammatical category of the word. Furthermore, a Torwali sentence exemplifying the use of the entry word is given in phonetic representation, followed by its English translation. Sound files are linked with the Torwali entry words as well as with the
Torwali example sentences so that their pronunciation can be heard as well.
More than 4,000 example sentences have been added and recorded so far.
The project's main goals and scope:
The main goals are to record, document and preserve a hitherto unwritten language of Swat Kohistan and thus to safeguard it for the future. Linguistic material is made available to the international academic community for further research on the language. Further, a goal has been to contribute to the promotion of mother-tongue education in the Torwali speaking community.
The project ’s strategy and activities:
The project initiator, Inam Ullah, began working on the dictionary compilation in
August 1996 by just picking up paper and pencil and using Platts' Dictionary of
Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884) for guidance, initially having no plans or professional know-how for writing a dictionary. A list of 1,200 words was compiled this way. Inam was then introduced to Dr. Joan Baart of SIL International, who was working on the neighbouring Kalami language, also known as Gawri. Baart
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION showed Inam Ullah a more professional way of collecting lexical items, namely the ‘shoebox method’. Thus, Inam started transferring the entire written database from his notebooks to 3x5 inch index cards, and putting them into actual shoeboxes, in alphabetical order. After writing more than 2,000 cards with basic lexical information, Inam Ullah, with the guidance and instruction of Dr. Baart, switched to using the computer program ‘Shoebox’ (created by SIL International and later modified and renamed ‘Toolbox’ – see http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/ ), which is a more modern way of capturing lexical information.
This linguistic software has turned out to be a great tool for the field lexicographer.
Previously, searching for a specific entry card to make important changes was a tedious job that took several minutes. But to find a required record on the computer is a matter of seconds. Also, the Toolbox program has flexible options for selecting, sorting and displaying data.
But even on the computer managing data can be time-consuming for a lexicographer, as thousands of data items have to be collected. Toolbox integrates various kinds of data and makes it quickly available. This software was found to be highly useful, except for a few drawbacks, such as its complexity in use and no easy solution for spell-checking.
Persons involved in the project:
Initially, this was a one-person project, free from any specific time frame, and the project activities proceeded on the principle of ‘learning by doing’. The project manager, Inam Ullah, is actually a high school teacher in the government school system who began this project as a hobby in his leisure time. Later, he received help via personal contacts with national and international linguists.
It was decided from the very beginning that the dictionary users would include both community members and academics. However, the project is also community-based in the sense that al l the project manager’s Torwali friends, students and relatives, as well as some language activists from different locations of the Torwali-speaking area, contributed to the dictionary by providing obsolete words, idioms and phrases, names of plants, birds, trees, animals, proverbs etc.
In this way, many variants and synonyms for lexical items could be compiled.
Further, in order to recall and collect a maximum number of items, the method of
‘semantic domains’ was used, by which students and friends were given particular domains to gather as many respective words as they could. For example, they were told to collect items on domains such as ‘agriculture’,
‘bullocks’, ‘watermill’ etc. The information thus compiled was entered into the program, glossed and translated into English and Urdu by the project manager.
Further human resources:
With the help of Dr. Baart, several printouts for checking the entries were made.
Furthermore, a small group of educated Torwali people interested in the documentation and preservation of their mother tongue (who are now organized as the Idara baraye Talim wo Taraqi or ‘Association for Education and
Development’) came together to support the project. This group helped the project initiator by checking the printouts and explaining the meanings of the items during long sessions of discussion. They also formed a spelling committee that, together with consulting linguists, could help resolve problems of
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION orthography for this previously unwritten language, specifically concerning the peculiar sounds of Torwali.
Financial resources:
For about one year starting in 1998, Inam Ullah obtained a small individual stipend for his work from an MA student in linguistics at the University of Texas at
Arlington (USA), Wayne Lunsford, who was carrying out linguistic research on the language and later presented his findings in his MA thesis, An overview of linguistic structures in Torwali, a language of northern Pakistan (2001).
Unfortunately, no financial aid could be secured from Pakistani government departments and organizations. Most of them appreciated the effort but had to deal with a lack of funds for supporting such activities.
Work on the web presentation of Inam Ullah's dictionary was funded as a project by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning under a grant entitled
"Digital Dictionaries for Less Commonly Taught Languages of Pakistan". It was a joint project for the dictionaries of three Pakistani languages: Khowar, Pashto and
Torwali. The collective budget was USD 36,978.
The sound recordings were made at the radio recording studio of the Allama
Iqbal Open University in Islamabad.
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION
3. OUTCOMES
Data accumulated:
An organized database with the following details has been collected in the computer program ‘Toolbox’:
Main Entries or Headwords = 5,100
Subentries = 1,688
Each entry comprises maximum information under the respective lexical fields such as homonym number, variants, cross-references and literal meanings.
Other details of the database:
• Over 4,000 Torwali example sentences translated into English and recorded on a Digital Audio Tape recorder and edited and copied to CD
• About 12,000 words entered as English glosses of Torwali words, to be used by Toolbox to build the English-Torwali wordlist
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Etymology of about 400 entries with English gloss of the Sanskrit as proto- language and reference number from Turner’s A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-
Aryan languages (1962-1966)
• More than 75 names of tribes and clans with genealogical information and their location
• 187 plant and tree names, also with English names
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About 75 entries with botanical/scientific names of plants and trees
140 Torwali proverbs with English translation
• 87 extra notes as encyclopaedic information, such as myths and historical and cultural information related to Torwali culture and society
Achievements and positive results on the community level:
One of the most satisfying outcomes of the project so far has been the attitude change in the Torwali community. Initially, community members showed little interest in the dictionary project, feeling ashamed of their language and considering the project futile. It is now reported from the community that this has changed dramatically, that extraordinary respect and support are now being shown to Inam Ullah and his work on the dictionary, and that educated as well as illiterate community members have begun to feel pride in their language. They offer useful suggestions and pray for the project’s successful and early completion. They also feel pride in knowing that a digital dictionary of their language is now available on the web. The change in attitude among educated people is particularly significant because the younger generation looks to them as models and a lot of them are public teachers
– it is their attitudes that can mould the coming generations. Many educated people now use original Torwali words in their conversation instead of the corresponding Urdu or English terms, as they did before.
Overall, one can say that the project has succeeded in empowering the community and in raising awareness of the importance of preserving the local
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION language. Another indicator of this success is the formation of the local Idara baraye Talim wo Taraqi (‘Association for Education and Development’ – its Urdu abbreviation being the first three letters of Torwali, Alif Bay Tae). The organization is now in the process of developing and carrying out a number of language safeguarding activities. It has developed an alphabet book and about a hundred small story booklets in Torwali, and is close to developing a primer.
These activities have also contributed to the capacity-building of the persons involved regarding the production of literacy materials.
Furthermore, the organization for the first time celebrated International Mother
Language Day in the community on 21 February 2007. Moreover, it holds debates and discussions concerning education in general and mother tongue education in particular, and morally and physically supports the dictionary project as well as a newly conceived multilingual education project within the community.
The Torwali dictionary project is the basis upon which other language preserving initiatives are now being built. It has successfully established a way to write
Torwali, being the first to resolve the issue of how to represent certain sounds different from Urdu and Pashto.
Further Outcomes:
(1) Online publication and copyright agreement
In 2000, Inam Ullah was invited by the University of Chicago to include his lexical database in their ‘Digital Dictionaries of South Asia’ project. The main objective of the project has been to make electronic dictionaries accessible to the international community via the World Wide Web. The resulting agreement was that the deal is a non-exclusive one, meaning that Inam was free to publish the database in print anywhere and also to re-sell the electronic file to someone else.
Further, the University of Chicago was bound to present the data on the web on a not-for-profit basis with regular updates and to honour the intellectual property rights of the dictionary compilers. (The digital dictionary can be accessed under http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/torwali.)
Until the launch of the database on the web the project initiator, as well as those responsible at the University of Chicago, were unaware of the fact that two out of five uncommon Perso-Arabic characters used to write Torwali were not Unicodesupported. This meant that Torwali words containing these characters would not be displayed properly on the web until the respective codes had been approved by the Unicode consortium (www.unicode.org). As the consortium, prior to approval, requires availability of literature to show this character in use
(something that is impossible to furnish for a hitherto unwritten language), four of the uncommon characters were instead adapted from the Shina language of north Pakistan, which is already Unicode-supported. The consortium has been approached through the University of Chicago for allotting the remaining code.
(2) Inclusion of Torwali in a university course
It was due to the dictionary project that Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) of
Pakistan contacted Inam Ullah personally and requested a unit on Torwali as teaching material for university courses. For the first time a smaller language like
Torwali made its way to a university course, which again caused a feeling of pride in the local community. Torwali is now one of eighteen Pakistani languages that are included and taught in the M.Phil. course on Pakistani languages at AIOU.
(3) Offer from the National Language Authority (Muqtadra Qaumi Zuban)
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION
The National Language Authority of Pakistan has formally invited the project initiator to re-arrange the existing database for the development of a Torwali-Urdu glossary, as part of their policy to relate regional and local languages to the national language of Pakistan. This would exclude the English part of the database. A separate database comprising the Torwali-Urdu part has been created for this purpose. Under Inam’s supervision, his brother and friends have voluntarily worked on editing the Urdu version of the dictionary over the past two years, and it is hoped that it will be ready for publication in 2010.
(4) Offer from the Frontier Language Institute
The Executive Director of the Frontier Language Institute (www.fli-online.org) has kindly declared his willingness to publish the dictionary through the FLI when it is completed.
(5) Grant from the National Geographic Society:
The project has recently won an individual award of USD 24,300 from the U.S.
National Geographic Society to edit, finish, and publish the dictionary within a period of two years. It is anticipated that 500-700 copies of the dictionary will be distributed among members of the Torwali speech community free of cost
(depending on the actual size of the finished dictionary and on printing costs).
The database will furthermore be securely archived both in electronic form as well as in hard copy. Managing the award will be a community-based activity involving community members in all stages of the decision-making process from the selection of taboo words to the design and layout of the dictionary. It is hoped that the Torwali community will be able to celebrate the paper publication of its first ever dictionary in June 2010.
Problems encountered:
One of the main problems has been that the dictionary project had not been planned and designed according to a master plan from the very beginning.
Priorities kept changing over the course of time due to a lack of the professional and technical expertise required for lexicography. A short course on dictionary project management would have helped the necessary capacity-building.
Lack of financial resources also multiplied the difficulties as the project initiator could not hire assistants.
Work still to be done:
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Expansion of the database up to 7,000 headwords and sub-entries
Completion of the addition of English definitions
Addition of the tonal descriptions to all entries and sub-entries
Work on the etymology of as many Torwali words as possible
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Identification of words borrowed from related languages
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Expansion to up to 5,000 example sentences with English translations
• Completion of the addition of scientific names to all the flora and fauna items in the database
Medical description of the Torwali names for diseases and symptoms
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UNESCO R EGISTER OF G OOD P RACTICES IN L ANGUAGE P RESERVATION
• Completion of the addition of character style codes throughout the database (these are for rendering focus words in bold, underlined, Italic, bold underlined or bold italic)
• Addition of words and variants relating to the Chail dialect of Torwali
Addition of Torwali idioms and phrases under the proper headword
Thorough editing and verification of the English part and spell-checking
Thorough editing and verification of the Urdu part and spell-checking
Lessons learned:
A big lesson learned is that a native person or group from the local community can do very well with this kind of a language preservation project, provided that proper technical and financial support is extended to them.
The present case also suggests that similar activities carried out in any local community may trigger the formation of formal or informal interest groups (such as the Idara baraye Talim wo Taraqi), which helps to empower a community in the long run and to ensure future success.
Recommendations to people carrying out similar projects:
It is recommended that in order to launch similar projects, locally educated language activists be identified, trained and equipped with modern techniques for preserving their language. They should be put into contact with a research body or a national or international university to promote academic excellence in their work on the respective language.
4. FURTHER RESOURCES http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/torwali/
Inam, Ullah 2004. Lexical database of the Torwali Dictionary . Paper presented at the Asia Lexicography Conference, Chiangmai, Thailand, May 24-26, 2004. http://crcl.th.net/sealex/Ullah_TorwaliDict.pdf
Lunsford, Wayne 2001. An overview of linguistic structures in Torwali, a language of Northern Pakistan . M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington. http://www.flionline.org/documents/languages/torwali/wayne_lunsford_thesis.pdf
This project was selected in the framework of UNESCO’s work for the safeguarding of endangered languages and intangible cultural heritage.
Web: www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages www.unesco.org/culture/ich
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