One Hundred Years of Linguistic Discovery (1908–2025)

Sadaket Ali Malik

sadaketjammu@gmail.com

The Bhaderwahi language is spoken mainly in the Bhaderwah area of the Chenab Valley in Jammu and Kashmir. The area witnessed an extraordinary scholarly journey over the past century. Once an unrecorded Western Pahari mother tongue has emerged as a key linguistic link between the Indo-Aryan and Dardic families. From T. Grahame Bailey’s first linguistic notes in 1908 to the phonological and sociolinguistic studies of the 2020s, Bhaderwahi research reveals a story of discovery, debate, and rediscovery.

The first academic mention of Bhaderwahi appears in T. Grahame Bailey’s seminal book The Languages of the Northern Himalayas (1908). Bailey collected vocabulary, basic grammar, and phonetic observ

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