Ebook: The Dying Linguistic Heritage of the Kashmiris: Kashmiri Literary Culture and Language

Center for Advanced Study Professor of Linguistics Emeritus and Jubilee Professor, 1990. - 54 p/The literary culture in Kashmiri has developed over the centuries in essentially two vital contexts of contact: cultural and linguistic. These two types of interactions have not always been harmonious or indeed welcome. The ultimate result of this contact and convergence, however, is the development of a literary culture in Kashmiri that embodies linguistic, contextual, and canonical characteristics of a contact language and contact literature. It is, therefore, conceptually and methodologically insightful to describe the small corpus of Kashmiri literary creativity2
and the medium of such creativity, the Kashmiri language, with reference to three interrelated regional characteristics: linguistic, sociolinguistic and literary.