The
Forum for Language Initiatives, Islamabad,
and SDPI are pleased to invite you at the official presentation of
the first copy of

The Ormuri Language in Past and Present

Written
by Dr. V.A. Efimov (originally published in 1986),translated
into English and edited by Dr. Joan L.G. Baart.

The
book presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on The future of
Ormuri and the world’s other endangered languages.

Distinguished
National Professor and renowned author Dr. Tariq Rahman has
kindly agreed to chair the function.

About
the book: Ormuri is the language of a
small Indo-Iranian community, part of which lives in Logar province in
Afghanistan, while the other part has its home in Pakistan, in South Waziristan
in the area of Kanigram. The language has, amazingly, persisted over many
centuries in the face of pressure from the surrounding predominant Persian and
Pashto languages. Nowadays, however, it is on the verge of extinction in Afghanistan (where only a few members of the
older generations are able to speak it), while it is still alive but seriously
endangered in Pakistan.
This monograph, which was originally written in Russian, makes an important
contribution to the documentation of Ormuri grammar. In addition, it lays out
the similarities and differences between the Logar and Kanigram varieties of
the language, and it draws lines to the distant past, arguing that Ormuri is
historically a northwestern Iranian language, even though its present
geographic location is near the southeastern corner of the Iranian language
territory.

About
the author: Dr. V.A. Efimov (1933 – 2007)
was a Russian linguist, affiliated with the Institute
of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences
in Moscow. He
was an expert of the languages of Afghanistan and of Iranian
linguistics in general. Dr. Efimov conducted his fieldwork on the Ormuri
language in 1971 in the Logar valley in Afghanistan. As he himself was not
permitted to cross the border, he sent a research associate to Kanigram to
collect data about the variety spoken there. He published several articles
about the language. His main work on Ormuri was published as a monograph in
1986.

About
the translator: Joan Baart studied Slavic
languages and general linguistics at Leiden
University, The
Netherlands, where he obtained his Ph.D. under the well-known Dutch phonetician
S.G. Nooteboom. In 1987 he was appointed as assistant professor of
computational linguistics, still at Leiden.
In 1990, Dr. Baart and his wife Esther joined SIL. Between 1991 and 2004, Dr.
Baart carried out linguistic research in Pakistan under an agreement between
SIL and the National Institute of Pakistan Studies. He has published several
volumes on Gawri, the language of Kalam and Dir Kohistan.