Torwali has long been an oral language like many other languages of northern Pakistan with smaller number of speakers. Colonel Biddulph made the first description of the language in his
great work Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (1888). He ‘devoted a page and a half to the main features of its grammar, and about twelve pages to a very useful vocabulary.’ But this was Sir
George Grierson who identified special sounds of Torwali in his work ‘Torwali: An Account of a Dardic Language of the Swat Kohistan’ and asserted that “the peculiar Dardic cerebral sounds
represented by (Latin characters c, j, s and z with dot below) respectively, are no doubt heard in Torwali, but their existence is not noted by Biddulph, nor had it been brought to the notice of
Sir Aurel Stein when he recorded his specimen.” Unfortunately, Grierson did indicate and approve the existence of all the consonants used in Torwali but did not notice the existence of
one near-open front unrounded vowel (normally represented by /æ/) which is widely used by the speakers. Among the foreigners, Wayne Lundford’s work (2001) is outstanding. He analyzed
thoroughly and verified Grieson’s identification of four peculiar consonantal sounds and all the vowels.
Torwali people used to think that their language could not be written because of lack of appropriate Arabic characters in Pashto or Urdu alphabets so as to represent the peculiar sounds
of Torwali. So, whenever they attempted to write their mother-tongue they used a Perso-Arabic character nearest to a peculiar Torwali sound.
Mr. Abdul Hameed Karimi was the first one among the locals who tried to write his mother-tongue (with the name of Kohistani, though) in Arabic-script in his booklet Kohistani-Urdu
Bolchal in early nineteen eighties. In his orthography Mr Karimi used Ý character (two vertical dots above SEEN) for representing /á¹£/ sound. If this character was to use word-medially this
could confuse with ت character. Also, he did not use any character to represent a retroflex affricate (represented by Latin ǰ with dot below) and a vowel sound (phonetically represented
by /æ/). So his work did not constitute a well-defined and complete character set for Torwali.
When Mr. Inam Ullah, a native speaker of Torwali, started to collect words for his Torwali Dictionary in 1996, he proposed a different character set. He was fortunate enough to enjoy
valuable guidance from Dr. Joan Baart, a renowned phonetician, who was working on Gawri language and lived in Kalam Swat. At the time Mr. Inam Ullah proposed four Arabic characters
(Ýœ، Ú‡، Ú™ and Ø£), three for consonants and one for the vowel /æ/, he was unaware of the existence of a voiceless retroflex affricate sound. Upon Dr. Baart’s reminding and explaining him
he proposed ݲ for that sound. Later he got these characters approved from the community language activists at a workshop.
Four out of the five proposed Torwali characters were already Unicode-supported but one special character proposed for the retroflex affricate was used by none of the Arabic script-based
languages so it needed to be applied for a Unicode. Dr. Elena Bashir and Dr. Sarmad Hussain had very kindly approached Unicode Consortium to get Unicode approval for the said character.
For this purpose they had presented Mr. Inam Ullah’s printed material as proof of community use of that character, thus making the Torwali character set completely Unicode-supported.
