Balochi language

Balochi (بلوچی, romanized: Balòci) is a Northwestern Iranian language, spoken by the Baloch people in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. There are also speakers in Oman, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Turkmenistan, East Africa, and in communities around the world. Altogether, about 8.8 million people speak Balochi, with most living in Pakistan.

Balochi has several main varieties, including Eastern (Soleimani), Southern (Makrani), and Western (Rakhshani). One special dialect, called Koroshi, is mainly spoken in the provinces of Fars and Hormozgan.

For many Balochi speakers, they learn to read and write in other languages like Urdu in Pakistan or Persian in Afghanistan and Iran, rather than in Balochi itself. Balochi belongs to the Western Iranian language family, and experts think its original home may have been near the central Caspian region.

Classification

Balochi is an Indo-European language spoken by the Baloch. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch and is part of the Northwestern Iranian group.

Glottolog identifies four types of Balochi: Koroshi, Southern Balochi, Western Balochi (together called Southern-Western Balochi), and Eastern Balochi. All these types are part of the "Balochic" group. Researcher Carina Jahani notes that ISO 639-3 groups Southern, Eastern, and Western Balochi together under the Balochi macrolanguage, with Koroshi kept separate.

Dialects

Main articles: Rakhshani dialect, Makrani dialect, and Eastern Balochi (dialect)

The Balochi language has three main groups of dialects. The Eastern group is spoken in parts of Pakistan, like Quetta, Kalat, and Khuzdar. The Southern group, also called the Makrani dialect, is used in southern Balochistan, including places such as Gwadar and Chabahar. The Western group, part of the Rakhshani dialect, is mainly spoken in western Balochistan, including parts of Iran and Afghanistan, especially in Sistan and Balochestan and Khorasan.

Other smaller dialects include Koroshi, which is spoken in the Fars province. There are differences between northern and southern tribal dialects, but they are not very big.

Phonology

Balochi has at least eight vowels: five long ones and three short ones. These vowels have different sounds, with short vowels sounding a bit different from long vowels. Some areas, like Karachi, have special vowel sounds too.

Balochi also has many consonant sounds that are used in both Western and Southern dialects. Some consonants change slightly depending on their position in a word. The way a sentence sounds can change depending on whether it is a question or a statement. Questions often end with a rising sound, while statements end with a falling sound.

Grammar

Balochi follows a normal word order where the subject comes first, then the object, and finally the verb, like in many other languages. One special feature of Balochi is that in past tense sentences, the subject and verb change places in certain ways.

The Balochi language does not distinguish between genders like some older Iranian languages do.

Numerals

Balochi shares many of its numbers with Persian. The first twelve numbers are written in a specific way, as shown in the tables below.

Writing system

Balochi did not have a written form before the 19th century, so people used the Persian script when they needed to write it. Even then, Balochi was mainly spoken in Baloch courts.

British officers were the first to write Balochi using the Latin alphabet. After Pakistan was created, Baloch scholars started using the Persian alphabet. The first book of Balochi poetry, Gulbang by Mir Gul Khan Nasir, was published in 1951 and used the Arabic Script. Later, Sayad Zahoor Shah Hashemi helped make the Arabic script standard for writing Balochi in Pakistan and Iran, earning him the title of the 'Father of Balochi'. In Afghanistan, people still use a changed version of the Arabic script that is based on Persian.

In 2002, a meeting was held to help decide on one script to use for Balochi.

Old Balochi Alphabet

Further information: Syed Zahoor Shah Hashmi

This old alphabet was used by Syed Zahoor Shah Hashmi in his Balochi dictionary called Sayad Ganj (سید گنج), which means Sayad's Treasure. It was the most common way to write Balochi until the Balochi Standard Alphabet was created, and it is still used a lot.

آ، ا، ب، پ، ت، ٹ، ج، چ، د، ڈ، ر، ز، ژ، س، ش، ک، گ، ل، م، ن، و، ھ ہ، ء، ی ے

Standard Perso-Arabic Alphabet

Main article: Balochi Standard Alphabet

The Balochi Standard Alphabet has 29 letters and was set by the Balochi Academy Sarbaz. It is based on the Perso-Arabic script and uses some letters from Urdu. It is also called Balo-Rabi or Balòrabi. Today, this is the script most preferred for formal writing and by educated people.

Latin alphabet

This Latin-based alphabet was chosen by the International Workshop on "Balochi Roman Orthography" at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, from 28–30 May 2000.

Alphabetical order

a á b c d ď e f g ĝ h i í j k l m n o p q r ř s š t ť u ú v w x y z ž ay aw (33 letters and 2 digraphs)

Soviet alphabet

In 1933, the Soviet Union made a Latin-based alphabet for Balochi.

This alphabet was used in many texts, like books for children and newspapers, but in 1938, using Balochi officially stopped.

Cyrillic alphabet

In 1989, a teacher from the Turkmen SSR suggested making a Cyrillic-based alphabet for Balochi. Before this, some people had already used Cyrillic to write Balochi, but it was not standardized. In 1990, the alphabet was completed.

Some small changes were made, and from 1992 to 1993, a few school books were printed using this script. But by the early 2000s, this way of writing Balochi was no longer used.