FLI Kalkoti Keyboard

Kalkoti, a Dardic language is spoken by more than 6500 people in Kalkot village of Dir Kohistan. Although merely verbal and not in written form, the language is vigorous as all age groups of the community use their native language for oral communication. However, due to close proximity, most of the community people are bilingual using Pashto side by side, the largest language of the province which has threatened the language as many linguists fear of a language shift in future.

FLI took up this language in 2021, as its 22nd language to work on, by initiating the developing steps first with identifying the issues the language is facing. The three day long intervention, called Issues in Language Development (ILD) workshop just concluded on June 10, 2021 in Kalkot area of Upper Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In total, 13 people from the community attended the activity. The purpose of the workshop was to lay the foundation of development work for the Kalkoti language by identifying the primary issues which may come in way of its documentation in future. The participants showed great interest to serve their language by taking part in all the sessions and contributed in successful implementation of first activity. They resolved to preserve and promote their native language and pass on to their young generations. This first activity in the Kalkoti language community was followed by the Orthography Workshop which facilitated the participants to choose a writing mechanism for their language, hence the language turned into the written form. The next proposed activity for the language is the Writers’ Workshop, to be held in July 2022 which will allow the writers of Kalkoti language community to further look into their language and as a result, the language will have a functional writing system.