Balochi

Why few Baloch read Balochi

Literacy for most Balochi speakers is in another language: Urdu in Pakistan, Persian in Afghanistan and Iran. Brian Spooner put it plainly, writing that very few Baloch read Balochi in any of these countries, whatever alphabet it is printed in.

Balochi was not a written language before the 19th century. Where something had to be written down, Persian script was used, although Balochi itself was spoken at the Baloch courts. British colonial officers were the first to write it, in the Latin alphabet.

Which alphabets have been tried for Balochi

After Pakistan was created, Baloch scholars took up the Persian alphabet. Gulbang by Mir Gul Khan Nasir, the first collection of poetry in Balochi, appeared in 1951 in Arabic script. Syed Zahoor Shah Hashemi later wrote a full guide to the Arabic script that became the orthography in Pakistan and Iran, and it earned him the title "father of Balochi". The Balochi Standard Alphabet of the Balochi Academy Sarbaz has 29 letters, extends the Perso-Arabic script and borrows a few glyphs from Urdu. Balochi spelling also uses a waw with a diacritic, ۏ. A conference in Quetta took up the question of a standard script in 2002.

The Soviet Union gave Balochi a Latin alphabet in 1933 and used it for children's books and newspapers until official use stopped in 1938. A Cyrillic alphabet followed in 1990, drawn up by the Turkmen SSR teacher Mammad Sherdil with the researcher Sergei Axenov; primary school textbooks were printed in it in 1992 and 1993, and it fell out of use in the early 2000s. A workshop at Uppsala University agreed a Latin orthography in May 2000. None of these displaced the Arabic script.

In Afghanistan Balochi is still written in a modified Arabic script based on Persian.

How the dialects divide

Three varieties dominate. They are Eastern (Soleimani), Southern (Makrani) and Western (Rakhshani). Western Balochi covers the Afghan speakers: its Panjguri sub-dialect is spoken around the Helmand River in southern and southwestern Afghanistan, and its Sarhadhi sub-dialect reaches Chahar Burjak. Soleimani, spoken in Pakistan, is often heard as the odd one out, probably through contact with Brahvi, Pashto, Sindhi and Punjabi. ISO 639-3 treats Balochi as a macrolanguage of Southern, Eastern and Western Balochi, and keeps Koroshi, spoken in Iran's Fars province, apart.

When Afghanistan recognised Balochi

Regional languages received official status where they were the majority language in 1980, and the 2004 constitution wrote that rule into law for Balochi and five others. An estimate for 2020 put Balochi speakers at 1% of Afghanistan's population.