Hazaragi: A Language Under Threat
In the Hazaragi language, the word for "bride" is beri - borrowed from Mongolic. The word for "thief" is qulaghay, also Mongolic. The word for "big" is kata, from Turkic. The word for "father" is ata, Turkic again. Beneath these, the grammar is Dari - an older form of it, in fact, preserving features that Kabuli Dari has long since shed. Hazaragi is not a single thing. It is a record of centuries: of who the Hazara people lived beside, traded with, were conquered by, and survived.
Between five and nine million people speak Hazaragi today - the range reflects the limits of available data, not a failure of measurement. Afghanistan has not conducted a reliable census in decades, and the Hazara population has been scattered by persecution across Pakistan, Iran, Australia, Europe, and North America. Wherever the estimates land, Hazaragi is not a small language. But it is a threatened one. It has no official status in any country. It is not taught in schools anywhere. Its digital infrastructure is minimal. And the people who speak it have spent more than a century under sustained political pressure.
This is an account of what Hazaragi is, how it came to be, why it is in danger, and what is being done to keep it alive.
What Hazaragi Is
Start with the classification question, because it is both linguistically substantive and politically charged.
Hazaragi sits within the Indo-European family, in the Iranian branch, within the Dari-Farsi language family. Its ISO 639-3 code is haz. The dominant academic view treats it as a group of dialects of Dari, the eastern form of Farsi that is one of Afghanistan's two official languages. On this view, Hazaragi and Kabuli Dari are mutually intelligible; the primary differences are accent and vocabulary.
That view is contested - and not only by Hazara nationalists. Linguist Najib Mayel Heravi has argued that Hazaragi dialects preserve some of the most ancient and authentic features of Dari, including archaic compound verbs, old particles, and pronouns characteristic of fourth- and fifth-century Dari. A 2025 book chapter published through Springer Nature, "Hazaragi and Linguistic Behaviour of the Hazaras," reflects growing academic interest in the language's distinct properties. A 2025 study in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, surveying Hazara speakers in Pakistan, found opinion genuinely split: roughly half of participants considered Hazaragi a language in its own right; the other half did not.
The institutional documentation reflects this ambiguity. Ethnologue lists Hazaragi (HAZ) and estimates between one million and ten million first-language users. The Encyclopaedia Iranica at Columbia University carries a dedicated article on the Hazaragi dialect, authored by specialists in Iranian linguistics - treating it as a dialect, but a distinctive one.
The structural grounds are real. Hazaragi contains retroflex consonants - specifically /t/ and /d/ variants (written as t and d with a dot below in formal transliteration) - that do not exist in standard Dari. It maintains certain consonants as distinct phonemes where Dari has merged them. It drops the /h/ sound in many spoken contexts. It marks plural differently depending on whether a noun is animate or inanimate: books are kitab-o, brothers are birar-u. It has developed modal verb forms, including a mirative mood, that go beyond the standard Dari system. These are not merely accent features. They are structural properties.
Whether that makes Hazaragi a distinct language or a highly divergent dialect is genuinely unresolved. The honest answer is that the question is partly empirical - how different is different enough? - and partly political. The political dimension is not trivial. When the Afghan state, and states before it, refused to give Hazaragi any official recognition, calling it a "dialect" was a useful frame. It positioned Hazaragi as a lower-register version of Dari, rather than as a language in its own right with its own claims on resources and recognition. The Hazara community's insistence that it is a language is therefore not simply about linguistics. It is about whether the language - and by extension the people - count.
For the purposes of this article, Hazaragi will be described as it is: a variety within the Dari-Farsi language family with distinctive phonological, grammatical, and lexical features that set it apart from standard Dari, carrying a substantial layer of Mongolic and Turkic vocabulary, and occupying a contested position in the language-vs.-dialect question.
Where Hazaragi Is Spoken
The homeland is the Hazarajat - a high-altitude plateau in central Afghanistan covering provinces including Bamyan, Daikundi, Ghazni, and parts of Kabul. Bamyan, famous internationally for the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, is a Hazara population center. So is Daikundi, further west and more remote. This territory is ringed by mountains, historically difficult to reach and administer, and that geographic isolation is central to understanding the language.
Beyond Afghanistan, Hazaragi is spoken by Hazara communities scattered across three continents. Quetta, in Pakistan's Balochistan province, has a Hazara community estimated at around 550,000 people - one of the most established outside Afghanistan, with roots going back to the mass displacement of the late nineteenth century. Iran, particularly Mashhad and the surrounding region, hosts a large Afghan Hazara population, some of whom have lived there for generations. The 2021 Iranian census recorded approximately 399,000 Dari speakers of Hazaragi dialects, though the actual number is believed to be higher because many Hazaras in Iran are undocumented.
Australia has become one of the most significant destinations for Hazaras abroad. Estimates suggest around 70,000 Hazara individuals in Australia, organized across more than 70 community groups, with significant populations in Melbourne and Sydney. Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States have established Hazara communities as well.
The cumulative effect of this dispersal is a language spoken on three continents, with no single country where it has official status, and with each host country generating its own pressures toward assimilation into the dominant local language.
How Hazaragi Developed
The Encyclopaedia Iranica's entry on Hazaragi describes the language as built from three historical strata - and that framework is the clearest way to understand what Hazaragi actually is.
The foundational layer is an older form of Dari that predates the Mongol conquest. This is not the modern Dari of Kabul and Herat but an older form, one that the cities lost through centuries of trade, court culture, and external contact while the isolated Hazarajat preserved it. This archaic Dari is the grammatical backbone of the language.
The second layer is Mongolic. The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century swept through the region, and the Mongolic influence on Hazaragi - in vocabulary, in some phonological features, in naming conventions - is substantial. Scholar Lutfi Temirkhanov has argued that the ancestors of the Hazaras were originally Mongol-speaking, and that their shift to Dari came through intermingling with Dari-speaking populations in the centuries after the conquest. On this account, Mongol tribes settling in the central highlands adopted the local archaic Dari while leaving a permanent Mongolic imprint. The words beri (bride), alaghay (palm of the hand), qulaghay (thief) are all Mongolic borrowings that survive in the language today.
The third layer is Turkic - specifically vocabulary borrowed from Turkic-speaking groups who moved through or co-inhabited the central plateau during the Timurid and early Mughal periods. Words like ata (father), kata (big), qara (black), and qush (eyebrow) are Turkic. The Turco-Mongolic layer accounts for approximately ten percent of Hazaragi's total lexicon, according to Esmail Qasemyar's study "The Hazaragi Dialect: A Study of Turkic-Mongolian Loan Words on Hazaragi Dialect of Afghanistan," published in the International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research.
The mechanism by which Hazaragi diverged from standard Dari is the same mechanism that drives language differentiation everywhere: geographic isolation. The Hazarajat's mountains separated its Dari-speaking communities from the centers where Dari was evolving - the cities, the courts, the trading routes. While Kabuli Dari modernized and standardized through those connections, Hazaragi preserved older forms and absorbed Mongolic and Turkic influence without those foreign elements being diluted by further external contact. The Hazara were also economically and politically marginalized for much of this period, which meant their language was not a language of administration or commerce. It was a language of mountain communities, oral poetry, and kinship networks - contexts where older forms are preserved rather than reformed.
The result is a language that is, paradoxically, both ancient and layered. Its Dari core is older than standard Kabuli Dari. Its vocabulary carries the traces of groups that passed through or settled among the Hazara over several centuries. And that entire accumulation has been sustained, until recently, primarily through speech.
The Threat
A History of Suppression
The clearest way to understand Hazaragi's endangered status is to start with a single event.
Between 1890 and 1893, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan - who ruled Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901 and is often credited with consolidating the Afghan state - declared jihad against the Hazaras following a series of uprisings. The result was not a punitive campaign but a near-destruction. Government forces and ethnic militias killed thousands of Hazaras, enslaved women and men, and redistributed Hazara lands to Pashtun tribes. Historians estimate that approximately 60 percent of the Hazara population was killed, enslaved, or driven out of their homeland.
The linguistic consequence was direct. An estimated four million Hazaragi-speaking refugees were driven into Pakistan, Iran, and other neighboring territories. The population base of the language - the community density that makes a language viable, the intergenerational transmission networks, the critical mass of speakers in the homeland - was shattered. Abdur Rahman Khan did not ban Hazaragi. He did something more effective: he destroyed the community that spoke it.
Hazaragi never recovered its official footing. When Afghanistan's 2004 constitution established regional official languages - Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashayi, Nuristani, and Pamiri - Hazaragi was not among them, despite Hazaras being one of the country's largest ethnic groups. The language remained invisible in the formal architecture of the state.
The Taliban Periods
During the first Taliban government (1996-2001), Hazaras faced targeted violence, massacres, and systematic exclusion from public life. The Taliban's hostility toward Hazaras - predominantly Shia, and associated with an ethnic identity that the Taliban regarded with particular animus - extended to cultural suppression broadly. Hazaragi media, education, and cultural expression had no formal protection.
Following the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, the situation has worsened. The New Lines Institute's 2022 Hazara Genocide Report documented ongoing killings, displacement, and the systematic elimination of Hazaras from government and civil society. The Taliban have nominally retained Dari's co-official status alongside Pashto, but international observers have documented pressure to promote Pashto at the expense of other languages. Hazaragi - without official status, without institutional infrastructure, without any legal standing - has no mechanism to resist this.
Radio Bamyan, which broadcast in Hazaragi during the period of the Afghan Republic government, has had its status under Taliban rule rendered unclear.
Stigma and the Low-Prestige Problem
Beyond state persecution, Hazaragi has carried social stigma for generations. It was - and in many contexts remains - considered the speech of rural mountain people, marked by Mongolic vocabulary that identified the speaker as ethnically other. Hazara speakers in urban Afghan contexts and in Pakistani cities have faced mockery for their accent and vocabulary. That mockery is not incidental. It is a mechanism of social pressure that drives language shift: speakers choose Dari, Urdu, or English for advancement, and Hazaragi recedes into private and domestic use.
This is the pattern linguists call diglossia: a high-prestige language for public and professional life, a low-prestige language for home and community. When the low-prestige language is systematically excluded from education, media, and institutional life, the shift from diglossia to language abandonment can take two or three generations.
The Education Gap
Hazaragi is not taught in schools anywhere. Not in Afghanistan. Not in Pakistan's Balochistan province, despite a Hazara population of around 550,000 in Quetta. Not in Hazara community schools outside Afghanistan. Language advocates in Quetta have reported that officials who introduced Hazaragi-language education initiatives prepared Dari curricula without consulting the Hazara community. University students in Balochistan who want to study their heritage language are directed toward standard Dari instead.
The absence of formal education is a structural vulnerability. Most Hazaragi transmission is oral - through family, through community, through speech. Oral transmission depends on community density and intergenerational contact. Both of those have been disrupted, repeatedly and severely, by displacement.
Language Loss Away from Home
The 2025 study in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics - "Hazaragi in My Opinion Is Not a Language" by Jafari, surveying Hazara speakers in Pakistan - documents what it calls "subtractive" identity change among younger Hazara speakers. Young Hazaras in Quetta express emotional attachment to Hazaragi. They associate it with home, with grandparents, with a sense of origin. But their practical and aspirational investments are directed toward English and Urdu. Their imagined futures do not include Hazaragi as a functional language.
This is the standard precursor to language death: an older generation that speaks the language as a primary means of communication, and a younger generation that understands it but produces it less and less, and whose children may not learn it at all.
In Australia, Canada, and the United States, the second generation is largely English-speaking. In Europe - Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere - they are growing up in the local language. Community elders are aware of this. Structural support for language maintenance is minimal.
What Is Being Done
The picture of documentation and preservation is uneven - some serious work, limited reach, no coordination at scale.
Dictionaries and Lexicography
The most comprehensive lexicographic resource is Dr. Mohammad Akbar Shahristani's Hazaragi-English Dictionary, with approximately 12,000 entries. It is available through the Internet Archive at archive.org, free and publicly accessible - but its existence is not widely known outside the community.
The Hazaragi Language Living Dictionary, accessible at livingdictionaries.app/hazaragi, is a community-supported digital project that includes dictionary entries, grammar documentation, and tutorial materials. It accepts community contributions and maintains a YouTube presence. This kind of collaborative, living resource is particularly important for a language with limited institutional backing.
SIL Global (the Summer Institute of Linguistics) has archived a "Farhang e ibtedai milli hazara" - a preliminary Hazaragi-Dari-English glossary - through its Language and Culture Archives. It is a baseline document, not a comprehensive dictionary, but its existence in an international archive is significant.
Hazara United is building toward hosting a community Hazaragi dictionary - a place where speakers, scholars, and learners can contribute and access the language together. If you want to be part of that effort, get involved.
Academic Documentation
Academic engagement with Hazaragi has been limited but is growing. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's dedicated article on the Hazaragi dialect remains one of the most authoritative reference sources. Esmail Qasemyar's study of Turkic-Mongolian loanwords in the language, published in the International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research, documents the lexical layer systematically. Recent Springer Nature publications on Hazaragi indicate that the language is moving into the academic mainstream, at least at the margins.
What is absent is a sustained research program. There is no major university linguistics department with a Hazaragi specialization. There is no large-scale corpus project. There is no funded documentation effort comparable to what has been directed at other endangered languages.
Community and Cultural Work
The most sustained institutional effort comes from the Kiblagh Azargi - the Hazaragi Academy in Quetta. The Academy developed a distinct Hazaragi writing script in 2019, designed to represent the language's unique phonemes, including its retroflex consonants, which the shared Arabic-based script does not capture. Community adoption of the script remains limited, but its development is significant: it represents a claim that Hazaragi's distinct sounds deserve distinct symbols, and that the language is not simply an imperfect version of Dari. The Academy's president, Ali Torani, has been a public advocate for Hazaragi's recognition as a distinct language.
Munji magazine, published monthly in Quetta for more than twenty years, is a sustained record of community literary production. Self-funded, it has developed approximately 30 Hazaragi-language writers and produced around 20 books, including poetry collections, prose, and a proverb anthology that has been translated into multiple other languages. For a language without institutional support, that is a substantial output.
PTV Bolan, Pakistan Television's Bolan channel, began broadcasting a one-hour weekly program in Hazaragi following advocacy campaigns. One hour per week is not much. But it is a precedent for Hazaragi in broadcast media - something that did not previously exist.
The website hazaragilanguage.com provides free access to Hazaragi literacy books, proverbs, stories, music, and films. It is independent and community-operated, though its content remains limited. Building a more comprehensive digital resource for Hazaragi is an active project for Hazara United.
The Digital Gap
Ethnologue notes that Hazaragi shows minimal digital support - meaning it lacks the infrastructure that would enable it to function in digital environments: keyboards, spell-checkers, localization tools, a substantial presence in the script on social media. Community YouTube channels, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook communities exist, but they are informal and fragmented.
The Hazaragi Living Dictionary and hazaragilanguage.com are the most structured digital documentation efforts currently operating. They are doing important work. They are not sufficient to reverse the structural gap.
Why It Matters
There is a version of this argument that appeals to linguistic biodiversity - every language that disappears takes a unique worldview with it, a way of parsing reality that cannot be reconstructed from the outside. That is true but it can also feel abstract.
The Hazaragi case is concrete in ways that make abstraction unnecessary.
Hazaragi oral literature - its proverbs, its folk songs, its poetry - encodes things that cannot be straightforwardly translated. The proverb anthology produced by Munji magazine and translated into multiple languages offers a partial window: many Hazaragi proverbs have no precise equivalent in Dari or Urdu, because they emerged from specific practices in a specific landscape over many centuries. When a language stops being spoken, the community can still learn Dari or English or Urdu. What it loses is the accumulated knowledge that exists in the specific form those things were said in Hazaragi. That is not recoverable by translation. It is recoverable only by keeping the language alive.
There is also a harder point. Hazaragi is not endangered primarily because its speakers have chosen to assimilate. It is endangered substantially because its speakers were killed, enslaved, and driven from their homeland in the 1890s; because the Afghan state refused to give it official status; because the Taliban suppressed the people who speak it; because Pakistani provincial governments prepared Hazaragi education initiatives in Dari without consulting the community; because the displacement of millions of people across three continents disrupted the intergenerational transmission networks that any language depends on.
The endangerment of Hazaragi is partly a story of modernization and language shift - processes that affect minority languages everywhere. But it is also a story of what happens to a language when the people who speak it are targets of sustained, documented violence. The New Lines Institute's 2022 report on what it describes as the ongoing persecution of Hazaras draws on evidence compiled by international human rights organizations. The language is under pressure partly because the people are under pressure. Those two facts are not separate.
Hazaragi is sometimes compared to other minority languages under political pressure: Kurmanji Kurdish, suppressed across Turkey, Syria, and Iran and sustained substantially by Kurdish communities abroad; Uyghur, associated with a persecuted ethnic minority in China, with documentation efforts carried out largely outside the territory where it is spoken. The structural parallels are real. The crucial difference is attention. Kurmanji and Uyghur have received substantial international scholarly and advocacy engagement. Hazaragi has received very little. The academic literature is thin. The digital infrastructure is minimal. The language lacks a presence in major international endangered language databases.
That gap in attention is not an argument that Hazaragi is more important than other threatened languages. It is an observation that the work of documentation, digitization, and community support that has been directed at other minority languages has largely not reached Hazaragi - and that the window for that work to be effective is not unlimited.
The people who are doing that work - the Kiblagh Azargi in Quetta developing a new script, Munji magazine producing books for two decades on no institutional funding, the contributors building the Hazaragi Living Dictionary, Dr. Shahristani compiling 12,000 entries by hand - are doing it without the backing that comparable efforts elsewhere have received.
What they are building is a record. Whether the language survives in active daily use will depend on factors beyond documentation alone - on whether Hazara communities can maintain density, on whether the political conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan change, on whether Hazara communities outside Afghanistan sustain intergenerational transmission. Documentation is not a sufficient condition for a language's survival. But it is a necessary one. And it is the work that is possible now, regardless of what else happens.
Hazaragi has outlasted the Mongol conquest, outlasted Abdur Rahman Khan's campaign, outlasted the first Taliban government. It is spoken today in Quetta, in Melbourne, in Toronto, in Stockholm, in cities across the United States. The question is whether the record it carries - five centuries of mountain life, of poetry and proverbs and borrowed words from peoples long gone - will remain accessible to the people who are its inheritors.