Khowar language
Khowar also called Chitrali, is a language spoken by over 400,000 people in Chitral and some valley in Gilgit Baltistan (including the Yasin Valley, Phandar and Gupis), and in parts of Upper Swat. Speakers of Khowar have also migrated heavily to Pakistan's major urban centres with Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi having size-able populations. It is spoken as a second language in the rest of Gilgit and Hunza.
Khowar has been influenced by Iranina Languages to some degree than other Dardic languages and has less Sanskritic elements than Shina or the Kohistani languages. Colonel Biddulph (Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh) was amongst the first westerners to study Khowar and claimed that further research would prove Khowar to be equally derived from Zend Old Persian and Sanskrit.
The Norwegian Linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote that Chitral is the area of the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Although Khowar is the predominant language of Chitral, more than ten other languages are spoken here. These include Kalasha-mun, Palula, Dameli, Gawar-Bati, Nuristani, Yidgha, Burushaski, Gujar, Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Persian and Pashto. Since many of these languages have no written form, letters are usually written in Urdu, Pakistan's national language.
Written Khowar
Khowar has been written in the Arabic Nasta'liq script since the early twentieth century, prior to that the administrative and literary language of the region was Persian and works such as poetry and songs in Khowar were passed down in oral tradition. Today Urdu and English are the official languages and the only major literary usage of Khowar is in poetry composition. Khowar has also been written in the Roman script since the 1960's. Badshah Munir Bukhari and the DirectorKhowar Academy, Rehmat Aziz Chitrali worked on the language and its family.