Gujari

Gujari (گُجری) also spelt Gurjari, Gojri, Gujri, Gojari, or Gurjar is a Central Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages, spoken by most of the Gurjars in the northern parts of India and Pakistan, as well as in eastern parts of Afghanistan. Gujari is the second most widely spoken language in Azad Kashmir, after Pahari, and third most widely spoken language in Jammu and Kashmir, after Kashmiri and Dogri. It is mostly spoken in the northern Pakistan, including Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Kashmir, and northern Indian states, including Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Haryana and also in the eastern parts of Afghanistan. Gujari has strong linguistic similarities to Rajasthani, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Gujarati, Dogri, and Pahari, especially in phonology and morphology, indicating the bond between it and these various Indo-Aryan languages.

It is spoken by 19% of population in Azad Kashmir and by 9.5% population in Jammu and Kashmir as the mother tongue. Gujari is written mainly in the Perso-Arabic script in Pakistan, but in India it is written in both the Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari.

In 1999 the Government of Jammu and Kashmir recognized Gujari by including the language in the sixth schedule of the state constitution. In March 2025 the Government of Azad Kashmir included the Gujari an optional subject in the course curriculum for grades 6 and 8. On 27 October 2025 the Provincial Assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa made Gujari the sixth officially recognized language in the provincial assembly.