Recording of Muneem Dawar reciting a personal account in the Hunza dialect of Burushaski.

A recording of Dawar Muneeb reciting the story “Daado Puno” in the Hunza dialect. This story describes the history of “Bophaw”, the custom of sowing seeds in January by the Hunza Burushos. It is said that there was a very virtuous man several centuries ago, who began this tradition.

Recording of Dawar Muneem reciting “Shon Gukur” in the Hunza dialect. This is a popular story about a shaman/minister in Baltit (Karimabad), that gave the Hunza Burushos important wisdom given to him by the fairies that blinded him.

This thesis was written to explore the structural case patterns of the Burushaski sentence and to examine the different participant coding systems which appear between noun marking and verb agreement. Verb suffixes follow nominative alignment patterns of agreement, while the verb prefix agrees with the affected argument as determined by semantic relations, as opposed to syntactic ones. The agent noun phrase is directly marked when highly active or volitional, suggesting a system of agent marking on the noun phrase and nominative alignment on the verb suffix. Nominative alignment also allows for a less marked presence of passive voice. Burushaski's agent marking is not entirely consistent; however, its nominative alignment is consistent. The conclusion is that Burushaski is not an ergative language at all.