Prasun language
language spoken by the Wasi people in the Prasun Valley in Afghanistan
Prasun is a Nuristani language spoken in the Prasun Valley in Afghanistan.
Prasun belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is on the Nuristani group of the Indo-Iranian branch. Prasun is considered as the most divergent of the Nuristani languages.
The Prasun-speaking people are now mostly Muslim since the imposition of Islam by the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan in 1895. They first followed out of intimidation, then became more devout as younger generations studied Islamic scriptures in Pakistan and India and came back to preach Islam, but they also keep some vestiges of their indigenous pre-Islamic religion. Literacy rates are low: below 1% for people who have it as a first language, and between 15% and 25% for people who have it as a second language.
Name
The endonym Vâsi [waˈsi] is ultimately cognate with Kamviri Přâsü̃ [pɽaˈsỹ] (whence the name Prasun) and Katë Přâsiu [pɽaˈsju].
Demographics
Prasun is a language spoken by the Vâsi (Prasuni) people who are located in the Pârun Valley, known as Vâsi-gul, at the beginning of the Pech River basin in Nuristan Province of northeastern Afghanistan. The native names of the language are Vâsi-vari in the Ṣupu dialect, and Vâsi-veri in the Seć dialect, but it is also known as Prasun, Prasuni, Pārūni, Veron, Verou, and Veruni. The population of Vâsi-gul is between 3,000-6,000, and there are approximately 8,000 native speakers within the valley and other areas, which makes it a vulnerable language.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Prasun language” is language spoken by the Wasi people in the Prasun Valley in Afghanistan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Prasun, language and spoken, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q32689. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1895.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prasun language” 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.