Oct 14, 2026 · Talat Bhat
Summary
The modern written form of Pahari was not born in Mirpur or Muzaffarabad but in north-west England, around kitchen tables in Manchester and Oldham, between 1989 and 1991. A small circle led by Tariq Mehmood and Shams Rehman, later joined by Ali Adalat and others, chose the Urdu (Perso-Arabic) alphabet, added letters for sounds Urdu could not write, and launched the magazine Chitka in 1991.
Alphabet: two sound problems drove the additions: a "double heh" (ھہ) and a retroflex nasal written as noon with a small toya (the letter now encoded in Unicode as ݨ, U+0768).
Saraiki link: that retroflex-nasal letter is the same letter Saraiki writers in Bahawalpur and Multan use. When Unicode encoded it in 2005, the official chart labelled it for "Saraiki, Pathwari". Saraiki goes further, with four implosive letters borrowed from Sindhi that Pahari does not need.
Fonts and keyboards: in the 1990s writers used Urdu InPage and drew the toya on printouts by hand. Unicode support arrived in 2005; dedicated Pahari-Potwari keyboards came later from individual developers, not from any institution.
Open gap: there is still no officially adopted Pahari standard, no Pahari-specific Nastaliq font, and no single keyboard everyone agrees on.
The dashed line marks 1991, when the alphabet went into print; everything to its right is adoption, encoding and media.
The language and its many names
Linguists call it Pahari-Pothwari, a Lahnda language of the Pothohar plateau, most of Azad Kashmir and western Jammu and Kashmir (Wikipedia). Speakers call it Pahari, Pothwari, Mirpuri, Poonchi or simply Punjabi, and SIL describes at least three main dialects: Pothwari, Mirpuri and Pahari.
The naming fight was political from the start. Shams Rehman records that Punjabi, Pothwari, Pahari and Poonchi advocates each claimed the others as their dialects, and that the Chitka group decided to print all the names in its first editorial rather than pick one (Rehman).
Britain: Rehman estimated up to 700,000 Pahari-speaking British Kashmiris plus about 200,000 Pothwari and Hindko speakers; only about two hundred families came from the Kashmir Valley with Koshur as mother tongue.
milestones in writing Pahari · 1982 to 2021
Census: the 2011 census was the first to let people write in Pahari, Pothwari or Hindko as a language. A 2015 parliamentary petition to recognise Pahari/Mirpuri gathered only 14 signatures (petition).
India-administered side: about one million Pahari speakers live mainly in Poonch and Rajouri, where Pahari was listed in the old J&K constitution's sixth schedule.
Before 1991: a spoken language with older scripts
Until the 1990s Pahari was spoken, sung and written in letters home, but not printed. Schooling in Azad Kashmir ran in Urdu and English, so speakers who could not read Urdu were counted as illiterate.
Older scripts: regional writers point to Landa and Sharada as historic scripts of the hills, and Takri for the Poonch side (ICPS 2005, Wikipedia: Poonchi). None of these survived in everyday use.
Folk literacy: Tariq Mehmood's argument was that most speakers could already read Arabic letters from the Quran. A Pahari written in those letters could make them readers of a language they actually understood (Rehman).
Poetic letters: Rehman notes a living tradition of letters written home in verse in the mother tongue, which Tariq used as proof that the language could be written. Across the line: in Indian-administered Kashmir, the magazine Sheraza had published in Pahari since 1982 through the state's Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, but the British group did not know this until 1999.
The Chitka movement in Britain
The alphabet came out of anti-racist politics, not academia. Shams Rehman met Tariq Mehmood and Jaleel at a 1989 protest meeting in Glodwick, Oldham, after the killing of Tahir Akram, a boy from Azad Kashmir. Both men spoke in Pothwari from the floor and were selling Pekar, the paper of the Pakistani Workers Association (Rehman).
Tariq Mehmood (Pothwari, raised in Bradford from 1967) was the driving idea. A founder of the Asian Youth Movement and a defendant acquitted in the Bradford 12 case of 1981, he argued that an unwritten language is treated as worthless, and that writing it was a route to mass literacy (BookTrust, Lancaster). He later wrote three bilingual children's books, co-ran the Pothwari monthly Sangi with Mirza Mehmood (Parala Publishers, about 20 issues), made the film Pahee Adha, and now teaches creative writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Shams Rehman (from Mohra Loharaan, Akalgarh, Mirpur; in Oldham from 1989) brought the Pahari side and named the magazine. Chitka is the Pahari word for the warm winter-morning sun he remembered from his village. Practical proof came from Urdu software, Surkhab and Sadaf, which he used as a volunteer at the Oldham Resource and Information Centre.
The circle widened in the early 1990s:
British Kashmiri and Pakistani activists: Asad Zia, Muneer Akhtar, Abid Hussain Hashmi, Adalat Ali, Haji Khaliq Hussain, Mohammed Arshad, Raja Anwar Fazal, Iftikhar Kiani.
Academic help: anthropologist Dr Roger Ballard joined the discussions.
Invited from South Asia: Akhtar Imam Rizvi, retired Radio Pakistan director and Pothwari promoter, and Bava Fazal Husain Rana, a Pahari and Gojari writer from Azad Kashmir.
The first Chitka (1991) was four A4 sides. Seven issues followed in Britain. The key policy decision was that Pothwari, Pahari, Gojari and Hindko writers should all use the same alphabet, and Rehman reports this largely happened.
The new letters
The Chitka alphabet is Urdu plus four additions and one optional simplification. Names, examples and shapes below are as Rehman describes them; the Unicode column is how each is typed today (Rehman, Unicode chart U0750).
Chitka letter Shape Sound and
examples
How it is typed in
Unicode
In Saraiki?
Rroon (noon
small toya)
ݨ Retroflex nasal
[ɳ]: khaṇa (eat),
peeṇa (drink),
behṇa (sit)
Its own letter,
U+0768, added in
Unicode 4.1
(2005), chart note
"Saraiki, Pathwari"
Yes, same letter (codepoints)
Rroon takes the small toya that already marks retroflex ڑ and ٹ; the double heh simply puts Urdu's two h-letters side by side.
Chitka letter Shape Sound and
examples
How it is typed in
Unicode
In Saraiki?
Dohrri hehey
(double heh)
ھہ The "heavy" h in
kahar (home),
kohoṛ i (horse),
pahavi (brother's
wife), pehen
(sister)
No new code
point: ہ U+06C1
followed by ھ
U+06BE
No; Saraiki keeps the older aspirates (ھب ,ھگ)
Oon ں with
pesh
Nasalised u ں U+06BA +
combining pesh
U+064F
No dedicated letter
Yee with
madda
ے / ی with
madda
Rehman names it
but gives no
example
ی or ے +
combining madda
U+0653
No
Simplified
spelling
(optional)
ت for ز ;ط
for ظ ض ذ;
one h
Same sound, one
letter, easier for
British learners
without Urdu
schooling
Ordinary Urdu
letters
Saraiki keeps Urdu's etymological spelling
how the two new letters were built
Two notes on the table:
What the double heh really marks (my reading, not Rehman's): his four examples are all words that Urdu and Punjabi spell with gh- or bh- (ghar, ghoṛ i, bhabhi, bahin). Pahari- Pothwari lost those voiced aspirates and replaced them with a tone or breathy quality. The double heh is in effect a tone mark, which is why no Urdu letter fitted.
The simplification did not stick as a rule. After wider debate the group made it a personal choice, so Pahari texts today mix both spellings.
Ali Adalat: from sceptic to first Pahari fiction writer
Ali Adalat (also written Adalat Ali or Ali Dalaat) first opposed the project. He called writing Pahari impossible and a distraction from the Kashmir independence movement. He changed his mind after his wife, Janat Ali, read and enjoyed a story in Chitka (Rehman).
Poonch Na Sarmad (The Chief of Poonch): short stories, the first story collection by a British Kashmiri in Pahari. It reached both Azad Kashmir and Indian-administered Kashmir.
Taharaan Ni Agg (Fire in the Mountain Range): a second story collection.
Mehla Aasman (The Dirty Sky): described by Rehman as the first Pahari novel. Lakeer: Adalat wrote this film about families divided by the Line of Control. Directed by Shiv Dutt Sharma for the Jammu NGO Abhiyaan, it opened at Hari Theatre, Jammu, on 14 January 2011 and is credited as the first Pahari feature film (Wikipedia: Dogri cinema).
Politically, Adalat led the Kashmir National Identity Campaign (KNIC). With Rehman he ran the 2001 census campaign telling British Kashmiris to tick "Other" and write "Kashmiri". He later joined the board of the KBC satellite channel.
Spread to Azad Kashmir and across the Line of Control
The alphabet travelled back to Kashmir through writers, not governments.
Mirpur, 2000: the Aalmi Pahari Adabi Sangat (APAS, International Pahari Literary Society), led by Dr Mohsin Shakeel, published a Chitka Millennium Number from Mirpur, with a Pahari version of Rehman's history (Rehman). Shakeel, a urologist, Pahari poet and former Director General of AJK Tourism and Archaeology, became the main Pahari voice in AJK (Academia).
Oldham, 4 October 1999: at a Kashmir Culture Day, Zafar Minhas from Indian-administered Kashmir met the British group. He brought Sheraza and his story book Chchamber, and promised to encourage writers there to adopt the British alphabet. Leeds, 2005: APAS and Leeds City Council held a Pahari Awareness Day, where Rehman presented the history this report draws on.
Television, 2006–2008: Rehman and Asad Zia launched Aapna, the first Kashmiri satellite channel, broadcasting from 12 June 2006 to 30 March 2008 with studios in Mirpur, then KBC. Both carried Pahari, Pothwari, Hindko and Gojari programmes. Azad Kashmir has still not made Pahari a school or official language. Recent university theses describe Poonchi Pahari as threatened and note it is written only informally (Wikipedia: Poonchi).
The solid arrows are writers carrying the alphabet; the dashed line shows that Saraiki reached Unicode with the same letter on its own.
spread of the Chitka alphabet · 4 destinations
Fonts, Unicode and keyboards
The technology always lagged the alphabet by about fifteen years, and Pahari got into Unicode on Saraiki's coat-tails. Newest first:
When What happened Source
Recent (v23) Mozilla Common Voice publishes a Pahari-
Potwari speech dataset: 15 validated hours,
2,077 sentences, 63 speakers, transcribed
in plain Urdu letters
Mozilla
2021 A Mirpuri-Pahari Bible translation goes
online (Bible.is, YouVersion), a large
typeset Pahari text corpus
ScriptureEarth
2010s (date not
found)
Chitral linguist Rehmat Aziz Khan Chitrali
releases a Pahari-Potwari keyboard for
Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, among
some 50 Pakistani-language keyboards
ELP
March 2005 Unicode 4.1 adds the Arabic Supplement
block, including ݨ U+0768 ("Saraiki,
Pathwari") and Saraiki's ݙ U+0759
Unicode chart, codepoints
2005 Rehman reports a TrueType Unicode font
with Rroon in progress but not yet
available, plus a one-click Gurmukhi–
Shahmukhi converter from a Preston
project (PLATT), lacking Nastaliq
Rehman
2003 Draft Unicode 4.1 charts already list
U+0768 as noon with small tah for "Saraiki,
Pathwari"
UTC draft
1990s Chitka typeset in Urdu InPage, which could
not make Rroon; the small toya was drawn
on printed copies by hand
Rehman
1991 Walsall schools publish Talkabout: an
introduction to Mirpuri
Glottolog
Open question: I could not identify who proposed U+0768. The likely source is the 2002 Arabic-extensions proposal that also brought in Saraiki's ݙ (Wikipedia: Saraiki alphabet); I found no evidence the Chitka group filed its own. Either way, the "Pathwari" label means Unicode treats Rroon and Saraiki ṇūṇ as one letter.
How close is it to Saraiki of Bahawalpur?
On paper the two alphabets are close cousins: both are Urdu-based, both added the same retroflex-nasal letter ݨ, and both movements began by rejecting the label "a dialect of Punjabi". The difference is that Saraiki started about 30 years earlier, inside Pakistan, with universities behind it, while Pahari was standardised by volunteers in England.
When What happened Source
c. 1989–91 Urdu packages Surkhab and Sadaf at
Oldham's resource centre convince
Rehman that a new language can be typed
Rehman
Point Pahari-Pothwari (Chitka) Saraiki (Bahawalpur, Multan) Language group Lahnda Lahnda; Bahawalpur's local variety was called Riasti, "of the state" (IIU)
Start of the written
standard
1989–91, Manchester and
Oldham
1950s–60s: Akhtar Waheed's Multani Zaban Da Qaida (1953), Mehr Abdul Haq's study from Bahawalpur Urdu Academy (1967); the name Saraiki adopted in the 1960s (Matan, IUB)
Who looks after it No official body; APAS and
individual writers
Saraiki Area Study Centre, BZU Multan; Saraiki Department, Islamia University Bahawalpur; Saraiki Adabi Majlis, Bahawalpur Base script Urdu Nastaliq Urdu Nastaliq, extended Shahmukhi
Retroflex nasal ݨ (Rroon) ݨ (ṇūṇ), previously written نڑ (codepoints)
The overlap is the whole Urdu alphabet plus Rroon; each side adds only what its own sounds demand.
What Pahari could borrow from the Saraiki experience: a university home that publishes a standard, a printed qaida for children, and a fixed letter list. What it should not borrow: the implosive letters, which have no Pahari sound to represent.
Point Pahari-Pothwari (Chitka) Saraiki (Bahawalpur, Multan) Implosive
consonants
None Four letters borrowed from Sindhi: ڳ ڄ ٻ and the Saraiki-specific ݙ (Wikipedia)
Old gh / bh sounds Became tone; written with
double heh ھہ
Generally kept as aspirates (،ھگ ھب)
Alphabet size Not fixed; two spelling schools 43 letters
Unicode Complete since 2005 using the
shared ݨ plus character
sequences
Complete since 2005
letters shared and not shared · Pahari vs Saraiki
Which fonts render the new letters
Any font that covers the Unicode Arabic Supplement block renders the whole Chitka alphabet, because Rroon (ݨ, U+0768) is the only addition with its own code point; the double heh, oon and yee are ordinary Urdu letters plus marks that every Urdu font has (Seraiki Fonts project).
Font Style Free Renders ݨ Notes
Noto Nastaliq Urdu Nastaliq Yes
(OFL)
Yes Works on web, Windows, Android, macOS; safest default for Pahari Voice Awami Nastaliq Nastaliq Yes
(OFL)
Yes Made by SIL for minority languages of south-west Asia; Graphite-only, so it works in Firefox, LibreOffice and XeTeX but not Chrome, Word or phones; best for print and PDF (CTAN) Jameel Noori Nastaleeq,
Mehr Nastaliq Web
Nastaliq Yes Varies by
build
Common Pakistani Urdu fonts; some builds lack U+0768 or break its medial form; test first Scheherazade New,
Lateef
Naskh Yes
(OFL)
Yes Among the first fonts to support Arabic Supplement
Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto
Sans Arabic, Noto Kufi
Arabic
Naskh /
sans
Yes
(OFL)
Yes More readable on web; good fallback and app font
Amiri, Jomhuria, Kufam Naskh /
display
Yes Yes On Google Fonts
Mirza, Katibeh, Nafees
Pakistani Web Naskh
Naskh Yes Medial
form
broken
Avoid
For the site: load Noto Nastaliq Urdu as the main font with Noto Naskh Arabic as fallback, and test Rroon in all positions before publishing, since the medial form (as in اݨکھا) is where fonts fail.
Gaps and next steps for Pahari Voice
The alphabet exists; what is missing is a fixed reference, a font that renders it well, and one keyboard people actually install.
Open questions I could not answer from sources: the exact years of Ali Adalat's three books; whether any Chitka issue survives in a library; and whether APAS in Mirpur adopted a fixed letter list.
Sources
Shams Rehman, Diaspora and Diversity: The Development of Pahari Language in Britain (paper from Pahari Awareness Day, Leeds, 2005; main source)
Kashmiris in Britain: The Crisis of Identity, ICPS journal, October 2005
Tariq Mehmood, BookTrust; Lancaster Writers Gallery; American University of Beirut Mohsin Shakil, Academia profile
Dogri cinema (Lakeer, 2011)
Font Style Free Renders ݨ Notes
Times New Roman, Arial,
Tahoma (recent versions)
Naskh No Yes Ship with Windows and Office
Fix the encoding: use U+0768 ݨ for Rroon, never a ن with a separately placed ط, and the sequence ھ + ہ for the double heh. Mixed encodings break search and any future speech or spell-check tools.
Test fonts: check that the site's Nastaliq font draws ݨ correctly in all four joining positions; many Urdu fonts lack the Arabic Supplement block.
Publish a keyboard: a phonetic Urdu-style layout with ݨ and ھہ on easy keys, built with an open tool such as Keyman so it runs on phone and desktop.
Build a qaida page: one public letter chart with audio, following the Saraiki model. Interview the founders: Tariq Mehmood (now in Beirut) and Shams Rehman can confirm details this report could not, including who designed the 2005 font.
Unicode chart: Arabic Supplement U0750; Unicode 4.1 draft charts, 2003; U+0768 on codepoints.net
Saraiki alphabet; Saraiki language; Siraiki Script: An Exploratory Review, Matan journal, Islamia University Bahawalpur, 2023; IIU on Saraiki history
Pahari-Pothwari; Pahari (Poonchi)
Pahari-Potwari keyboard, Endangered Languages Project; Mozilla Common Voice Pahari-Potwari; ScriptureEarth, Mirpuri Pahari; Talkabout: an introduction to Mirpuri,
UK Parliament petition 59445
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