Request to enable: Hindko

I would like to request that either of the codes hno or hnd be enabled for translation on TranslateWiki. The two codes for this language are "Northern Hindko" and "Southern Hindko," however the dialects of the language do not map clearly to this geographic distinction. Awankari, a dialect of the south, may be grouped with Kohati, a dialect of the north, while Peshawari and Abottabadi Hindko are spoken at roughly the same latitude. It is preferable that one code is used—it does not matter much which—to support a translation which may represent the features of the language common across the various dialects. Something I noticed when looking at the portal pages for these codes is that they each have an incubator Wikipedia, on which there is a single page which is identical between the two.

Resources and references: Hindko in Kohat and Peshawar is a paper which offers a helpful overview of Hindko dialect geography. The dialect it does not touch on, Hazara Hindko (dialect of Abottabad), is covered extensively in Halil Toker's Hindko grammar and in Elena Bashir's descriptive grammar. Hazara Hindko may be considered "northern" for what it is worth and is the most spoken dialect if that is any reason to pick one code over the other. The most comprehensive account of the Awankari dialect is Lahndi phonology by Hardev Bahri. There are a few dictionaries of Hindko, most only in print, but Peshawar based Gandhara Hindko board offers one as a mobile app. (I have a few of their Hindko apps on my phone and I suspect they just use the Urdu language code due to lack of support from Android. The number of resources online for the language is definitely ahead of where various tech platforms expect it to be.)

I will give full disclosure and point out my background is Punjabi, which is a language mutually intelligible with Hindko (in a similar sense to Norwegian and Danish by analogy). I have translated the Lexeme Forms message group in a way that is grammatical in both languages in order to support the Hindko templates there, however, this was only possible due to the message group being small and domain specific enough to do things like avoid feminine nouns entirely (they inflect differently between the two). It should be possible to attract more translators once the language is available as an option.

OK, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to add it as "hno", and with the autonym "ہندکو". If anyone ever asks to distinguish them, then we'll figure something out.

Excellent, thank you! I am glad it isn't too much trouble to make this work.

This is now enabled.

Note that [hno] (Northern Hindko) is for Hazara Hindko (also called Kagani or Kaghani), whereas [hnd] (Southern Hindko) is grouping the four dialects of Attock, Kohat, Central Peshawar and Rural Peshawar (distinguished in Glottolog and the Linguist List, but not in ISO 639).

Both use the same Arabic script, and if they seem to be written the same, that's probably because of minor phonologic differences, and the written form in Arabic may not mark these differences explicitly with diacritics for actual vowels or voewl qualities, or alterations of consonants. The difference may be more evident in the spoken language.

The current autonyms written in Arabic script also still does not show these distinctions between [hno] and [hnd]; as well Hindko languages seem to form a continuum, both being part of the Lahnda macrolanguage (in its Northeastern branch according to Glottolog) in ISO 639, that macrolanguage also covering the more distant Khetrani (actually a Sindhic language), also written with the Arabic script.