Hindko
Indo-Aryan language spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India
Hindko (ہندکو, romanised: Hindko, IPA: [ˈɦɪnd̚koː]) is a polyphyletic label for a diverse group of Lahnda dialects spoken by several million people of various ethnic backgrounds in several areas in northwestern Pakistan, primarily in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northwestern regions of Punjab.
The name "Hindko" is a Pashto exonym meaning "the Indian language" or "language of Hind", and refers to the Indo-Aryan speech forms spoken in the northern Indian subcontinent, in contrast to Pashto itself, a neighbouring Iranic language spoken by the Pashtun people. An alternative local name for this language group is Hindki. A speaker of Hindko may be referred to as Hindki, Hindkun, or Hindkowan (Hindkuwan).
Like other Lahnda varieties, Hindko is derived from the Shauraseni Prakrit. Hindko to some extent is mutually intelligible with Punjabi and Saraiki, and has more affinities with the latter than with the former.
There is a nascent language movement, and in recent decades Hindko-speaking intellectuals have started promoting the view of Hindko as a separate language. There is a literary tradition based on Peshawari, the urban variety of Peshawar in the northwest, and another one based on the language of Abbottabad in the northeast. In the 2023 census of Pakistan, 5.6 million people declared their language to be Hindko, while a 2020 estimate placed the number of speakers at 7 million.
Geographic distribution and dialects
Varieties of Hindko are primarily spoken in a core area in the district of Attock in the northwestern corner of the province of Punjab, and in two neighbouring regions: in Peshawar to the north-west, and Hazara to the north-east, both in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Hindko” as indo-Aryan language spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q382273. The Library of Congress control number is sh85060895. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hindko” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.