The seminar in Iranian Languages at the University of Hamburg led by the late much-lamented Ronald Emmerick was greatly interested in the modern languages of the family, and one of its students, Beate Reinhold, was encouraged to take up Waxi, for the study of which she undertook several long visits to the Gojal Valley in the Hunza area of North Pakistan in the 1990s.
Great Britain's ‘Great Game’ with Russia, during the nineteenth century, created the Waxān Corridor in the eastern Pamirs in 1873 to separate British territory from Russian, and the arrangement has remained to this day. Whilst Waxi-speakers (estimated by Georg Morgenstierne in 1938 at perhaps 10–15,000) may form the majority in Waxān, they are all mixed with and surrounded by speakers of other languages (Dardic, Nūristānī, as well as several other Iranian languages of the eastern Pamirs) so that many Waxi- speakers are bi- or tri-lingual. In the Gojal valley to the southeast of Waxān proper (north of Hunza) the principal competing language seems to be Burušaski, a language of unknown connexions. The Gojal valley along the Hunza River lies a bit more than 100 km as the crow flies from the main Waxi settlement along the Āb-i Panja (Oxus) and the Waxān-daryā Rivers but, given the extremely rugged mountainous nature of the terrain, communication is very arduous and difficult.
The first real information about the language came from an article by R B Shaw in JASB, 1876, which gave a grammar and vocabulary (v. LSI, X, 457 for further references), and Sir George Grierson based his very brief account of it on Shaw's materials. Even from Shaw's incomplete and insufficient description, it was immediately clear Waxi was a very interesting modern Iranian language: its very peculiar phonology, its infinitives and past participles containing n, the very odd forms of its personal pronouns, the existence of 3 verbal stems (instead of the usual modern Iranian 2), and the preservation of many Iranian and even Indo-European lexical items lost elsewhere.
But further documentation was slow in coming, until Georg Morgenstierne in Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages II, 1938, produced the first satisfactory account, both synchronic and diachronic, based on his notes from 1929. He also furnished the first etymological vocabulary, but only 3 short pages of new text.
Isolated remains D R L Lorimer's two-volume The Wakhi Language of 1958. Mentioned in Reinhold's bibliography, it is not clear if she has made any use of it. New impetus was given to Waxi studies in the 1980s by Georg Buddruss's publication of several collections of Waxi proverbs collected in situ, as well as a folklore text, published in 2001, in Strany i Narody Vostoka, Vol.30, 1998, 30–45; and ‘Wakhi Sprichwörter aus Hunza’, Festschrift Humbach, 1986, (pp. 27–44).
Russian scholars began to take an interest in the Pamir languages early in the 20th century, and for Waxi that interest began when T. A. Pakhalina, using much more data, wrote a first comprehensive grammatical study in 1966, Vakhanskij Jazyk, only to trumped a little later (1976) by Gryunberg and Steblin-Kamensky's massive volume in the University of Leningrad's series ‘Languages of the Eastern Hindu-Kush’, Vakhanskij Jazyk, (GSK), containing several hundred pages of texts of every sort with translations, drawings of implements used in daily life, a 233-page vocabulary, as well as 130 pages of description of Waxi phonology, morphology, lexicon and even notes on syntax. This work has become the standard base for detailed scientific study of the language by Iranianists; it was followed in 1999 Steblin-Kamensky's Etimologičesky Slovar' Vakhanskogo Jazyka.
Anyone contemplating work in Waxi in the 1990s was well-advised to get in touch with these scholars in St Petersburg first, and that is what this author did, spending 3 months in the city just before the untimely death of Gryunberg in 1995. She has thereby greatly increased the reliability of her work and the confidence which other Iranianists will have in it.
I may as well say now that Reinhold's work, with 217 pages of texts and translations is good and very worthwhile, increasing as it does by a large measure the variety and extent of reliable Waxi texts. A particular interest of these texts – 13 quite extensive ones, in dialogue form – is that for the first time it was possible to use women as well as men as informants, and no less than 10 of these ‘dialogues’ stem from women, who range in type and status from elderly monoglots, uneducated and untravelled females to others who are young educated travelled and multilingual (some with Urdu or even English). (I myself was often told that women spoke a slightly different language from their menfolk, especially amongst themselves, but only on two occasions in many years of language-gathering was it possible to seek information directly from women – both in quite exceptional circumstances.) The extraordinary breadth and diversity of the experience of Reinhold's 13 informants, of which 10 were women, is summarised in tabular form on p. 110.
The method used is that now universally adopted by field workers in language: to make recordings on tape and to work them over later. It is always a good idea to check again with the original speaker, but it is not clear if that was done in this case. Speakers often change their minds upon hearing a replay.
Reinhold's introductory remarks on the Gojal dialect are sensible and informative. The “new developments” of her title refer to changes in the language in Gojal over the years from 1990 (her first visit) to 1999. These seem principally to concern a rapidly developing mutilingualism, especially amongst younger speakers who now travel about in Pakistan and have developed close and continued contact with speakers of the other languages, especially Urdu, and often even English. Reingold devotes several chapters to sort of “social-lingulistic survey” of what she found, with fashionable discursions on the theory of loans/borrowings which seem to this reader largely otiose. She also has a chapter on native Waxi efforts to develop a written language, and describes well the great cultural changes of the last 30 years. Waxi is not threatened, it seems.
The consonant system of Waxi is, even for an eastern Iranian language, extraordinary complicated, and one needs a very practiced ear to hear all the contrasts. Reingold follows the now universally accepted scheme of GSK, which appears to fit Gojal speech well. The difficulty lies in the vowels, which seem rather unstable, varying from district to district, and even with the same speaker at different times. GSK allows 6 vowels, all short (and denies that length, although undeniably present, is phonemic). It is disputed whether what Reinhold writes as /e/ should not rather be written (with Buddruss) as /i/ or as GSK, /bl/. But the real problem is Reinhold's û, e.g. in žû ‘my’, mûlk ‘state’, (h) ûmr ‘age’, vrût ‘brother’, etc. It does not seem to have a simple correspondent in other transcriptions, sometimes originating from a short /u/, but sometimes corresponding to GSK /bl/ or to /a/. It may represent a real dialect characteristic of Gojal. Whilst long vowels certainly exist on Gojal speech, I have not found any minimal pairs. The matter needs further study.
Reinhold has provided no Glossary, nor grammatical notes. To make her study complete, she must urgently prepare a Glossary to her ‘dialogues’, listing all variants and grammatical forms which occur. It would be very pleasant for all students of Waxi if she adopted the alphabetical ordering system advocated by Sir George Grierson and used by Morgenstierne (and by the present writer) whereby entries are ordered by consonant only, taking vowels into account only when the consonantal framework is identical. This facilitates greatly the use of any vocabulary of an Iranian language, and especially Waxi, where some of the vowels are in dispute.
Whilst she is about it, she might consider adding a decent map (that given on p.108 is woefully inadequate), one which shows all place names mentioned in the texts, and in which the spellings correspond.
