Forum Pakistan

Balochi is spoken in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India, the Arab Gulf States, Turkmenistan and East Africa. It is classified as a member of the Iranian group of the Indo-European language family which includes Kurdish, Persian (Farsi), Pashto, Dari, Tajik, Ossetian. Balochi is closely related to Kurdish and Persian.

There are two main dialects: Eastern and Western. It is difficult to estimate the total number of Balochi speakers, but there are probably around six million, most of whom speak Western Balochi, which is also the dialect that has been most widely used in *Balochi literature. Within the Western dialect are two further dialects, Rakhshani (in the northern areas) and Ma1<rani (in the south). The areas where Eastern Balochi dialects are spoken (the north-eastern area of Pakistani Balochistan, *Punjab and *Sindh) are in many ways less developed, especially when it comes to education, than other parts of Balochistan, which accounts for why it is little used in the written form.
Although some works in Balochi had appeared before partition, the Balochi literary movement got fully under way only after the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: B.A. Baloch, 'The beginning of radio broadcasting in Baluchi: a brief report', Newsletter of Baluchistan Studies (No.2, Spring 1985), Naples, Italy; Carina Jahani (ed.), 'Lanug ag e in Society-Eight Sociolinguistic Essays on Balochi', Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala, 2000.