Kashmiri

Kashmiri, called Koshur by its speakers, is the chief language of the Kashmir Valley and the largest member of the Dardic group, a geographical cluster of northwestern Indo-Aryan hill languages across the Hindu Kush. These preserve archaic Old Indo-Aryan features such as three sibilants; the extinct Gandhari language was of the same type.

Kashmiri took shape as it emerged from Apabhramsha Prakrit, and its first literary monuments are the vakhs, short mystical verses of the Shaivite poet Lal Ded, who lived from about 1320 to 1392.

From the 8th century Kashmiri was written in the Sharada script, but from the 14th century Persian served as the court language under the Muslim sultans, enriching Kashmiri vocabulary, and the Perso-Arabic script gradually joined Sharada as a literary hand. Kashmiri has a verb-second word order, unusual for Indo-Aryan.