Khāṣi language
Khāṣi (खाषी) is an Indo-Aryan dialect spoken in Jammu and Kashmir, India. It belongs to the Western Pahari group of languages and is used in the mountainous areas north of Jammu.
It is spoken on both sides of the Chenab River. To the north, the Panj Gabbar region of Ramban district includes the valleys of Arnās–Bamhāg, Gool, Gulābgaṛh, Māhore, and Budhal. To the south, it is spoken in the Bamhāg-Pancheri block and in several villages between Arnas and Dubli Gali.
Khāṣi neighbors other languages such as Kashmiri, Sarazi, Dogri, Pahari, and Bhaderwahi. The total number of speakers is not known, and many people counted as "Pahari" in census data may actually be Khāṣi.
The language shares distinctive sounds with Bhaderwahi, including a combination of a retroflex stop plus a lateral (for example, ṭ͡lai for “three” and niḍ͡l for “sleep”). These sounds come from historical changes where a consonant plus r in the older language became a single sound, similar to patterns seen in Sanskrit words like trīṇi- and nidrā-.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 15:32 (CET).