Ethnolinguistic Identity And Cultural Memory In The Dawoodi Community

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between language, ethnolinguistic identity, and cultural memory within the Dawoodi-speaking community of Mominabad, Hunza, in northern Pakistan. Positioned as the eighth study in a sustained longitudinal research program on the Dawoodi language and its speakers, this paper builds upon a body of work that has traced the community's linguistic trajectory from language shift and intergenerational disruption (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2019) through lexical attrition and generational competence loss (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2020), evolutionary structural collapse (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2021), linguistic hegemony and institutional marginalization (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2022), contact-induced structural dilution (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2023a), ideological internalization and language attitude formation (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2023b), and the transformation of heritage into social liability through derogatory nomenclature and identity reconstruction (Ishfaq & Bhatti, 2024). The present study extends this trajectory by examining what is at stake culturally when language competence declines: how Dawoodi functions not merely as a communication system but as the primary repository of the community's collective memory, social knowledge, oral traditions, and shared worldview. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, narrative analysis, and oral history documentation conducted within the Mominabad community, the research demonstrates that Dawoodi encodes cultural knowledge — in kinship systems, oral narratives, ceremonial language, ecological vocabulary, and craft traditions — that is not transferable into dominant languages without fundamental transformation and partial loss. As language competence declines across generations, access to this cultural memory becomes increasingly fragmented: younger speakers, with limited proficiency in Dawoodi, are not merely less linguistically capable but are culturally disconnected from the narratives, practices, and social values that the language carries. The study argues that language loss in this community extends far beyond the loss of a communication system, representing the progressive erosion of cultural continuity, collective identity, and intergenerational knowledge transmission. It situates the Dawoodi community within theoretical frameworks of ethnolinguistic vitality, cultural memory, and language-culture interconnection, arguing that revitalization efforts must go beyond structural documentation and linguistic pedagogy to encompass the preservation and transmission of the cultural narratives and practices that are embedded within the language and inseparable from it. The study contributes to interdisciplinary discussions at the intersection of endangered language linguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies by providing the most comprehensive account yet available of what the Dawoodi language carries culturally, and what is being lost as it disappears.