Torwali is a previously unwritten language of the Indo-Aryan family of Indo-European languages, spoken by approximately 120,000 indigenous people in the northern hilly district Swat of Pakistan. Half of the speakers have migrated to the urban areas permanently thus making the language very vulnerable to extinction. Genetically, this language is related to Kohistani language group comprising Indus Kohistani, Shina Kohistani, Gawri etc.
Mr. Inam Ullah, the pioneer in Torwali orthography and lexicography started on the compilation of the lexicon of his mother-tongue in 1996 as an amateur linguist-lexicographer but many people, both from the local as well as academic community, helped him in collecting, refining, designing and structuring the data over the years. The work has won recognition from the UNESCO’s Register of Good Practices in Language Preservation in 2006.
After publication of the test version of Torwali-Urdu Lughat in 2010 from FAST-NUCES Lahore and the unpublished Torwali-English Dictionary, very valuable feedback came from both the academic as well as the Torwali community. The non-Torwali academic feedback addressed semantic and grammatical aspects of the English and Urdu part of the content while the native Torwali feedback concerned sociolinguistic aspects, such as, missing, incomplete or ambiguous content along with very useful suggestions to include encyclopaedic information about local historical lore, rituals, myths, clans, and place names. These feedbacks have been incorporated along with the enhanced data with the help of the newer sophisticated software ‘FLEX’. Previously, the data had been kept shifted from Shoebox to Toolbox programs over the years. There are now more than 8000 entries with as much accuracy, completeness and detailed lexical information as possible with the active involvement of the community people. Older versions of the database are already made available on the sites of University of Chicago, USA (in 2005) and Center for Language Engineering, Lahore (in 2010) for the academic and speech communities free of charge. See Online Torwali Dictionary and (http://cle.org.pk/otd/). A test version of limited hard copies of the Urdu component was published in 2010 with support from National Geographic Society and Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing, Lahore, (now renamed as Center for Language Engineering, CLE at UET Lahore).
After publication of the test version of Torwali-Urdu Lughat in 2010 from FAST-NUCES Lahore and the unpublished Torwali-English Dictionary, very valuable feedback came from both the academic as well as the Torwali community. The non-Torwali academic feedback addressed semantic and grammatical aspects of the English and Urdu part of the content while the native Torwali feedback concerned sociolinguistic aspects, such as, missing, incomplete or ambiguous content along with very useful suggestions to include encyclopaedic information about local historical lore, rituals, myths, clans, and place names. These feedbacks have been incorporated along with the enhanced data with the help of the newer sophisticated software ‘FLEX’. Previously, the data had been kept shifted from Shoebox to Toolbox programs over the years. There are now more than 8000 entries with as much accuracy, completeness and detailed lexical information as possible with the active involvement of the community people. Older versions of the database are already made available on the sites of University of Chicago, USA (in 2005) and Center for Language Engineering, Lahore (in 2010) for the academic and speech communities free of charge. See Online Torwali Dictionary and (http://cle.org.pk/otd/). A test version of limited hard copies of the Urdu component was published in 2010 with support from National Geographic Society and Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing, Lahore, (now renamed as Center for Language Engineering, CLE at UET Lahore).
