ABSTRACT
‘Dardic’ is a geographical cover term for those Northwest Indo-Aryan languages which, because of their isolation in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, Swat and Indus Kohistan, the Karakorams and the Western Himalayas, have retained ancient and developed new characteristics different from the IA languages of the Indo- Gangetic plain. Although the Dardic and the Nuristani (previously ‘Kafiri’) languages were formerly grouped together, Morgenstierne (1965) has established that the Dardic languages are Indo-Aryan, and that the Nuristani languages constitute a separate subgroup of Indo-Iranian.
