Languages are vanishing as climate change displaces Pakistan’s mountain communities

The 2010 floods in northern Pakistan are still a fresh and painful memory for Inam Torwali, a Torwali-Kohistani lexicographer. One of the worst humanitarian disasters in Pakistan’s history, the floods led to large-scale migration from the northern mountainous regions of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Torwali was among those who lost their home. His fields were flooded, forcing him and his family to migrate to the Pashtun-dominated Mingora city, 59 kilometres from his hometown in the Swat district.

The after effects of the disaster still linger. One of the most obvious is the threat to his spoken language – Torwali. “Youth who migrated to cities… are now speaking either a different Torwali dialect with many borrowed words from the dominant languages – Punjabi, Pashto, and Urdu – or cannot speak it at all,” he told Dialogue Earth. His nephews now speak Pashto, the lingua franca of the province.

“Climate change has caught mountainous communities unaware with no education to assess the enormity of the crisis and no strategy on how to cope with it,” Torwali said. This is exacerbated by the fact that the climate strategy of Gilgit-Baltistan portrays migration, and remittances from those that have migrated, as a positive adaptation strategy.

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s climate strategy acknowledges climate-induced migration, but limits its adaptation strategy to...

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