In his outline of geolinguistics Roland Breton (1991: xvi-xix) has identified six dimensions of operation, i.e., spatial, societal, economic, temporal, political, and linguistic. Consequently language development is seen as a ?...process, combined with territorial, demographic-societal, ecomediatic, historical and politico-linguistic spread, that constitutes the heart of language dynamics? (Breton 1991: xvii). A survey of comparatively small languages in remote regions poses a great challenge to an approach based on a multi-dimensional focus like that. This especially holds true when these are incorporated in administrative entities of rather recent establishment. Circumscriptions are obvious, a few central difficulties might be emphasized: Cartographic representation is often of poor quality, census data are lacking, politico-historical units change, the aggregation of information might be irrelevant to contemporary theoretical and methodological requirements, concepts of ethnic groups are questioned and the interpretation of ethnicity is linked to different theories, and in general the interest in scientific enquiry varies over schools of thinking and over time. In spite of all these limitations there remain some good reasons for repeated efforts to survey linguistic diversity in remote regions such as the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalaya mountain arc. First, members of small language groups are very often neglected by national census authorities which concentrate on majority groups and omit others. A multitude of languages remain unrecorded and/or are hidden in areas of ambiguity. Second, comparisons with historical language descriptions and colonial records reveal a dynamism of mobility in those regions which is regularly denied. Migration processes can often be linked to linguistic groups and result in peculiar cultivation and settlement patterns. Third, an examination of linguistic diversity might present a starting point for an intensified discussion on concepts of ethnicity and encourage further enquiries in the perception of mother tongue, bilingualism, and multilingualism.In this contribution some material is presented from an empirical survey in the Eastern Hindukush and Karakoram of Northern Pakistan enlarged with some comparative information from neighbouring regions in Badakhshan (Northern Afghanistan), Gorno-Badakhshan (Tajikistan), and Xinjiang (Peoples? Republic of China). The study aims at shifting the focus to minority languages and analysing linguistic diversity in historical and spatial perspective. Thus, the importance of regionalized and localized patterns of heterogeneity is stressed. The starting point is an appreciation of the ?mountain languages? in the national context of Pakistan.
