However, the original Prakrit spoken by common man of Kishtwar in olden times has absorbed some words from Dogri, Punjabi, and Persian languages to a limited extent.

Grierson, in his Linguistic Survey of India, classified Kishtwari as a highly divergent variety of Kashmiri that had been profoundly influenced by neighbouring Punjabi and Western Pahari languages.

A wordlist and preliminary grammatical sketch of Kishtwari were compiled in The Languages of the Northern Himalayas.

Linguists like Siddheshwar Varma consider Kishtwari an intermediate between Western Pahari languages and Kashmiri.

Grierson remarks that an idiosyncratic variant of Takri is used to write the Kishtwari language; as well as observing that there does not appear to be standard spelling nor a consistent orthography.