Talpur dynasty Balochi (بلۏچی, romanized: Balòci) is a Northwestern Iranian language, spoken primarily in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
In addition, there are speakers in Oman, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Turkmenistan, East Africa and in diaspora communities in other parts of the world.
[4] Balochi varieties constitute a dialect continuum and collectively at least have 10 million native speakers.
According to Brian Spooner,[8]Literacy for most Baloch-speakers is not in Balochi, but in Urdu in Pakistan and Persian in Afghanistan and Iran.
Even now very few Baloch read Balochi, in any of the countries, even though the alphabet in which it is printed is essentially identical to Persian and Urdu.Balochi belongs to the Western Iranian subgroup, and its original homeland is suggested to be around the central Caspian region.
[9] Balochi is an Indo-European language, spoken by the Baloch and belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the family.
[10] According to Carina Jahani research,[11][12] ISO 639-3 groups Southern, Eastern, and Western Baloch under the Balochi macrolanguage, keeping Koroshi separate.
[9][11] Lashari[9] centered on the village of Lashar , south of Iranshahr where Balochi close to Persian and Baskardi.
[23] One difference is that grammatical terminations in the northern dialect are less distinct compared with those in the southern tribes.
[23] An isolated dialect is Koroshi, which is spoken in the Qashqai tribal confederation in the Fars province.
In Eastern Balochi, it is noted that the stop and glide consonants may also occur as aspirated allophones in word initial position as [pʰ tʰ ʈʰ t͡ʃʰ kʰ] and [wʱ].
[citation needed] British colonial officers first wrote Balochi with the Latin script.
The first collection of poetry in Balochi, Gulbang by Mir Gul Khan Nasir was published in 1951 and incorporated the Arabic Script.
It was much later that Sayad Zahoor Shah Hashemi wrote a comprehensive guidance on the usage of Arabic script and standardized it as the Balochi Orthography in Pakistan and Iran.
[37] The following alphabet was used by Syed Zahoor Shah Hashmi in his lexicon of Balochi Sayad Ganj (سید گنج) (lit.
The following Latin-based alphabet was adopted by the International Workshop on "Balochi Roman Orthography" (University of Uppsala, Sweden, 28–30 May 2000).
[41] 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) In 1933, the Soviet Union adopted a Latin-based alphabet for Balochi as follows: The alphabet was used for several texts, including children's books, newspapers, and ideological works.
It included the following letters: The project was approved with some minor changes (қ, ꝑ, and ы were removed due to the rarity of those sounds in Balochi, and о̄ was added).