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

Contributors & Testers

Contributors & Language Editors

  • 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
A comprehensive dictionary mapping standard spelling conventions, and vocabularies.
Languages of Northern Areas
Carla F. Radloff
Key linguistic research establishing standard spelling conventions, retroflex character symbols, and phonetics for Dardic dialects.

Credits & Special Mentions

Orthography & Standardization

Heartfelt thanks to the scholars, authors, and language activists of Gilgit-Baltistan whose decades of research standardized the Arabic-based Shina script orthography.

Typography & Fonts

Beautiful rendering of Shina text is enabled by Google Fonts' Noto Naskh Arabic and specifically tailored Perso-Arabic typefaces optimized for Nastaliq and Naskh scripts.

Open Source Community

This application is powered by Next.js, React, Lucide Icons, and the Vercel ecosystem. Built with to promote digital literacy.