Moghol language

Common card · No. 368849

Moghol (or Mogholi; Dari: مُغُلی) is a critically endangered and possibly extinct Mongolic language spoken in the province of Herat, Afghanistan, in the villages of Kundur and Karez-i-Mulla. The speakers were the Moghol people, who numbered 2,000 members in the 1970s. They descend from the Mongol army of Genghis Khan who conquered Afghanistan (then part of the Khwarazmian Empire) in the 13th century. In the 1970s, when the German scholar Michael Weiers did fieldwork on the language, few people spoke it, most knew it passively and most were older than 40. By 1982, Moghol was nearly extinct; it had "survive[d] mainly as a language of folklore and memories". It is unknown if there are still speakers of the language, and it is listed as dormant by Ethnologue. The language has been strongly influenced by Persian in its phonology, morphology and syntax, causing Weiers to state that it has the appearance of a "true Inner Asian creole language".

Read on Wikipedia · Image Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 2.5