The Parkari Koli language (sometimes called just Parkari) is an Indo-Aryan language mainly spoken in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. It is spoken in the southeast tip bordering India, in the Tharparkar District, Nagarparkar. Most of the lower Thar Desert, west as far as Indus River, bordered north and west by Hyderabad, to south and west of Badin.[1]
77%–83% with Marwari, 83% with Wadiyara Koli.[1]
The orthography was standardized in 1983-84 and used from 1985 onward. It is based on the Sindhi alphabet which is itself based on modifications done on Persian alphabet, with three additional letters: [3]
These letters all use an inverted V (like the circumflex) as the diacritical mark. The decision to introduce this symbole was so that these letters would stand out more clearly in Parkari language, as Sindhi already makes frequent use of dots, including letters having as many as 4. The below table shows the Parkari alphabet. These new letters are shaded in blue. Letters shaded in yellow are solely used in writing of loanwords, and the phoneme they represent are also represented by other letters in the alphabet. Letters and digraphs shaded in green aren't usually considered as part of the base alphabet. They are either commonly used digraphs representing aspirated consonants, or are ligatures serving a grammatical function. These ligarues include the ۽, which is pronounced as [ãĩ̯] and represents and, and the ۾, which is pronounced as [mẽ] and it creates a locative relationship between words.
Similar to its parent alphabet, Sindhi, the orthography of the letter hāʾ, especially as it comes to typing as opposed to handwriting, has been a source of confusion for many. Especially because whereas in Arabic and Persian, there exists one single letter for hāʾ, in Urdu, the letter has diverged into two distinct variants: gol he ("round he") and do-cašmi he ("two-eyed he"). The former is written is written round and zigzagged as "ہـ ـہـ ـہ ہ", and can impart the "h" (/ɦ/) sound anywhere in a word, or the long "a" or the "e" vowels (/ɑː/ or /eː/) at the end of a word. The latter is written in Arabic Naskh style (as a loop) (ھ) , in order to be used in digraphs and to create the aspirate consonants.
For most aspirated consonants, Parkari relies on unique letters as opposed to the Urdu practice of digraphs. However, this doesn't apply to all aspirated consoants. Some are still written as digraphs. The letter hāʾ is also used in Parkari to represent the sound [h] in native Parkari words, in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and to represent vowels (/ə/ or /əʰ/) at the end of the word. The notations and conventions in Parkari and Sindhi are different from either Persian or Arabic and from Urdu. Given the variety of the types of hāʾ across these languages for which Unicode characters have been designed, in order for the letters to be displayed correctly when typing, a correct and consistent convention needs to be followed. The following table will present these in detail.[5][4]
Below text is the translation into Parkari of the New Testament, specifically a few of the first verses in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. This translation has been produced by the Pakistan Bible Society, an evangelist NGO that has its organizational roots in territories that formed Pakistan, since the time of British colonization. [6]
