Kashmiri (Koshur) is a northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated mostly in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. It has about 4,611,000 speakers: 4,391,000 of whom reside in India and 105,000 of whom reside in Pakistan. While Kashmiri belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages it is sometimes placed in a geographical sub-grouping called Dardic. It is one of the 23 scheduled languages of India.

It is a V2 word order language. Kashmiri has remained a spoken language up to the present times, though some manuscripts were written in the past in the Sharada script, and then in Perso-Arabic script. Currently, Kashmiri is written in either the Perso-Arabic script (with some modifications) or the Devanagari script. Among languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, Kashmiri is practically unique, in that it regularly indicates all vowel sounds

Kashmiri is the state official language of Jammu and Kashmir and also one of the national languages of India. Some Kashmiri speakers use English or Hindi as a second language. In the past few decades, Kashmiri was introduced as a subject at the university and the colleges of the valley. At present, attempts are on for inclusion of Kashmiri in school curriculum.

In 1919 George Abraham Grierson wrote that “Kashmiri is the only one of the Dardic languages that has a literature”. Kashmiri literature dates back to over 750 years, this is, more-or-less, the age of many a modern literature including English.

There are two online newspapers in Kashmiri Koshur Akhbar and Sangarmal.

Kashmiri poetry

The Kashmiri language has a rich literary heritage. It has been the language of numerous Sufi and folk poets. The songs in the Kashmiri language are called gewun /gewun/ and the chorus songs are known as wonwun /wonwun/.

The earliest literary composition in Kashmiri that has survived is the poetry of Lalleshvari, a 14th century mystic poetess.

Amongst great Kashmiri writers was Mahmud Gami, a prolific writer who used with equal competence almost all forms of poetry in Kashmiri - mathnavi, vatsun, ghazal, rouf, na’t - although his greatest contribution is in the area of mathnavi. His free rendering and adaptation of several Persian mathnavis inaugurated a long tradition of mathnavi writing in Kashmiri which includes such distinguished names as those of Wali-ul-lah Mattoo, Abdul Ahad Nazim, Wahhab Parrey, Muhi-ud-Din Miskeen, Amir-ud-Din Kreri, Maqbool Shah Kralawari Shams-ud-Din Hairat. and Mir Haseen Subla`.Sufi Peot.

Among the modern writers are moderns like Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor and Abdul Ahad Azad. Dinnath Nadim, Rehman Rahi, Muzaffar Aazim and Amin Kamil are the important poets of the post modern period. Akhtar Mohiuddin has gained reputation in fiction particularly in the art of short story.