KHOROG, August 15, 2009, Asia-Plus — A group of young journalists in Gorno Badakhshan have decided to publish a newspaper in the Pamir languages.
The first issue of the weekly, entitled
Khirtsirakh
(Sunrise), will be brought out within the next few days.
The
Khirtsirakh
editor Khoushomad Alidod said in an interview with Asia-Plus that the main objective of the newspaper was in preserving and developing the Pamir languages as well as culture and traditions of the peoples of Gorno Badakhshan.
The first issue of the newspaper will contain materials (stories and verses) in Shughni-Rushani, Wakhi and Yazgulyami languages.
“
Khirtsirakh
is an eight-page weekly and at first it will have a circulation of 99,” said Alidod, “One of entrepreneurs from Khorog is sponsoring the weekly.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the monthly
Farhangi Badakhshon
(Culture of Badakhshan) was publishing materials in Tajik and the Pamir languages.
The Pamir languages are a subgroup of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by Pamiri people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries. This includes the Badakhshan Province of northeastern Afghanistan and the Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region in Tajikistan. Smaller communities can be found in the adjacent areas of Pakistan where many have settled in recent decades. Sarikoli, one of the languages of the Pamir group, is spoken beyond the Sarikoli ridge on the Afghanistan-China border, and thus qualifies as the eastern-most of the extant Iranian languages.
Members of the Pamir language group include Shughni, Sarikoli, Yazgulyami, Munji, Sanglechi-Ishkashimi, Wakhi, and Yidha. These are Southeastern Iranian languages.
