About Us

Our Mission

We're not a company. We're just a group of people who care about Shina — the language, the script, the culture — and got tired of waiting for someone else to do something about it.

Shina has always been spoken more than written. For a lot of us, learning the script meant digging through old books, asking elders, or piecing things together on our own. There was no clean, accessible place to start. So we built one.

The Shina Qaida is our attempt to change that — a free, modern way to learn the Shina script, made for the community, by people from that same community. No paywalls, no subscriptions, no expiry. Just the language, open to anyone who wants to learn it.

We're a small team and we don't have all the answers. But we're listening — to feedback, to suggestions, to anyone who tells us something isn't working. This project grows as the community grows, and that's exactly how we want it.

The Team

Community Promoters & Advocates

Contributors & Testers

Contributors & Language Editors

  • Punjrush
  • Seema Batool (Gilgiti Dialect)
  • Wazir Basit Ali (Astori Dialect)
  • Nimra Samad (Puniyali Dialect)
  • Local Shina Language Committee Advisors

Community Testers & Reviewers

  • Shah-e-Jehan Mir
  • Shiekh Aadil
  • Shayista
  • Zeeshan
  • Naveed Ahmad
  • Nusrat
  • Gul Afrooz
  • Saba Jabeen

Books & Research References

Shina Qaida
Dr. Ruth Laila Schmidt & Razwal Kohistani
Key linguistic research establishing standard spelling conventions, retroflex character symbols, and phonetics for Dardic dialects.
Shina Urdu Dictionary
Muhammad Amin Zia
Comprehensive vocabulary and definitions documenting roots across Gurezi, Gilgiti, and Kohistani dialects.
The Shina Language
Dr. Georg Morgenstierne
Pioneering phonetic transcription of Dardic dialects in Indo-Aryan linguistics.