Pakistan’s regional languages close to being extinct

Around a hundred women have gathered in a community centre in Peshawar, the heart of Pakistan’s fabled northwest — but they are conversing in a dialect incomprehensible to the Pashtun ethnic group that dominates the region.

Instead they are exchanging anecdotes and ideas in their native Hindko (literally, “the language of India”) at a conference organised to promote the increasingly marginalised language.

Pakistan’s 200 million people speak 72 provincial and regional tongues, including official languages Urdu and English, according to a 2014 parliamentary paper on the subject that classed 10 as either “in trouble” or “near extinction”.