Brahui language

Brahui
براوی Bráhuí
Spoken in	Balochistan
Native speakers	2.2 million  (1998)
Language family	Dravidian Northern Brahui
Writing system	Perso-Arabic, Latin
Official status
Regulated by	Brahui Language Board (Pakistan)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	brh
The Dravidian languages Brahui (at far upper left) is quite geographically isolated from the other Dravidian languages

Brahui (Urdu: براہوی) or Brahvi (براوی) is a Dravidian language spoken by Brahui people of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Iran. It is isolated from the nearest Dravidian-speaking neighbour population by a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres (930 mi).

Distribution

Brahui is spoken in the southwest region of Pakistan, as well as regions of Afghanistan and Iran which border Pakistan; however, many members of the ethnic group no longer speak Brahui. The 2005 edition of Ethnologue reports that there are some 2.2 million speakers; 90% of those live in Pakistan, mainly in the region of Balochistan.

Classification

Brahui belongs, with Kurukh (Oraon) and Malto, to the northern subfamily of the Dravidian family of languages. It has been influenced by the Iranian languages spoken in the area, especially Balochi.

Brahui language is seen as a recent migrant language to its present region. Scholars accept that Brahui could only have migrated to Balochistan from central India after 1000 CE. The absence of any older Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui supports this hypothesis. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a Northwestern Iranian language, and moved to the area from the west only around 1000 CE. One scholar places the migration аs late as the 13th or 14th century. However, a few scholars have hypothesised that Brahui is a remnant of a formerly widespread Dravidian language family that is believed to have been reduced or replaced during the influx of Iranian/Indo-Aryan languages upon their arrival in South Asia.

Dialects

Kalat, Jhalawan, and Sarawan, with Kalat as the standard dialect.

Orthography

Brahui is the only Dravidian language which has not been written in a Brahmi-based script in the recent past; instead, it is written in the Arabic script. More recently, a Roman-based orthography named Brolikva which is short form of Brahui Roman Likvar has been developed by the Brahui Language Board of the University of Balochistan in Quetta. and adopted by Talár Talar.

Below is the new promoted Bráhuí Báşágal Brolikva orthography:

b

á

p

í

s

y

ş

v

x

e

z

ź

ģ

f

ú

m

n

l

g

c

t

ŧ

r

ŕ

d

o

đ

h

j

k

a

i

u

ń

ļ

Basic words and phrases

From Bashir 2003:

• one - asiŧ
• two - iraŧ
• three - musiŧ
• what - anth

Endangerment

See also: List of endangered languages in Asia

According to a 2009 UNESCO report, Brahui is one of the 27 languages of Pakistan that are facing the danger of extinction. They classify it in "unsafe" status, the least endangered level out of the five levels of concern (Unsafe, Definitely Endangered, Severely Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Extinct).

Publications

Haftaí Talár recently became the first ever daily newspaper in Brahui language. It uses the new Roman orthography, and is "an attempt to standardize and develop Brahui language to meet the requirements of modern political, social and scientific discourse."

References

• Online Brahui Dictionary. Brahui Dictionary
• Emeneau, Murray B. (1962), "Bilingualism and structural borrowing", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (5): 430–442, JSTOR 985488 
• Elfenbein, J. H. (1987), "A Periplus of the 'Brahui Problem'", Studia Iranica 16 (2): 215–233, doi:10.2143/SI.16.2.2014604 
• Parkin, Robert (1989), "Some comments on Brahui kinship terminology", Indo-Iranian Journal 32 (1): 37–43, doi:10.1007/BF00182435 
• Sergent, Bernard (1997), Genèse de l'Inde, Bibliothèque scientifique Payot, ISBN 9782228891165, OCLC 38198091 
• Witzel, Michael (February 1998), "The Languages of Harappa", in Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Proceedings of the Conference on the Indus Civilisation, Madison, Wisconsin, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/IndusLang.pdf 
• Bashir, Elena (December 2003), "Brahui - Notes", South Asian Language Resource Center Workshop on Languages of Afghanistan and neighboring areas, http://salrc.uchicago.edu/workshops/sponsored/121203/resources/brahui.pdf, retrieved 2010-06-29 
• Lewis, M. Paul, ed. (2009), "Report for language code: brh", Ethnologue: Languages of the World (16th ed.), Dallas, Texas: SIL International, http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=brh, retrieved 2010-06-23 
• Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2009), Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, UNESCO, OCLC 435877932, http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00206 

External links

• Brahui Language Board
• Bráhuí Báşágal (Brahui Alphabet)
• Profile of the Brahui language
• Partial bibliography of scholarly works on Brahui
• Britannica Brahui language