{{Mergefrom|Hindko language|date=September 2006}} '''Hindku''' is the mother tongue of a significant numbers of people in central city area of Peshawar, Kohat, Attock and most of Hazara Division in NWFP (North West Frontier Province) of Pakistan Hindku is closely associated with three other local languages i.e. Pothowari, Pushtu and Punjabi. Hindku is also mutually understandable with Punjabi. Substantial number of Hindku speakers can also speak Pushtu . Hindku is based on Arabic/Persian Alphabet and is written from right to left The term Hindku is often used to refer to the speakers of the Hindku language, but in popular usage it may designate the language as well. The NWFP Imperial Gazetteer (1905) regularly refers to the language as Hindku. More than one interpretation has been offered for the term Hindku. Some associate it with India, others with the Hindu people, and still others with the Indus River, which is of course the etymological source of all these terms. Long before independence Grierson, in the Linguistic Survey of India, employed the term Hindku to mean "the language of Hindus" (viii, 1:34) Linguists classify the language into the Indic subgroup of Indo-European languages and consider it to be one of the Iranian languages of the area. An estimated 2.4 per cent of the total population of Pakistan speak Hindku as their mother tongue, with more rural than urban households reporting Hindku as their household language. The speakers of Hindku live primarily in five districts: Mansehra, Abbottabad, Peshawar, and Kohat in NWFP, and Attock in Punjab. Jonathan Addleton states that "Hindku is the most significant linguistic minority in the NWFP, represented in nearly one-fifth of the province's total households." In Abbottabad District 92 per cent of households reported speaking Hindku, in Mansehra District 47 per cent, in Peshawar District 7 per cent, and in Kohat District 10 per cent (1986). Testing of inherent intelligibility among Hindku dialects through the use of recorded tests has shown that there is a northern (Hazara) dialect group and a southern group. The southern dialects are more widely understood throughout the dialect network than are the northern dialects. The dialects of rural Peshawar and Talagang are the most widely understood of the dialects tested. The dialect of Balakot is the least widely understood. In most Hindku-speaking areas, speakers of Pashto live in the same or neighbouring communities (although this is less true in Abbottabad and Kaghan Valley than elsewhere). In the mixed areas, many people speak both languages. The relationship between Hindku and Pashto is not one of stable bilingualism. In the northeast, Hindku is the dominant language both in terms of domain of usage and in terms of the number of speakers, whereas in the southwest, Pashto seems to be advancing in those same areas. However, over the past forty years, the position of Pashto speakers appears to have strengthened in the Hindku-speaking areas. Category:Languages_of_Pakistan {{ie-lang-stub}}