| Brahui or Brahvi | ||
|---|---|---|
| بروہی | ||
| Spoken in | Balochistan | |
| Total speakers | 2.2 million (2005 Ethnologue Report) | |
| Language family | Dravidian
|
|
| Writing system | Perso-Arabic | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | – | |
| ISO 639-3 | brh | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Brahui (بروہی) or Brahvi is a language spoken by Brahui people. It is the only Dravidian language exclusively spoken by people not originated from India. (Tamil is the only other Dravidian Language which is spoken by nationals of different countries and used as official language in Singapore, Srilanka etc., but Tamilians in countries other than India are migrated population from India)
Brahui is spoken in the southwest region of Pakistan and border regions of Afghanistan and Iran with Pakistan. The 2005 edition of Ethnologue reports that some 2.2 million speakers are in the world and 90% of whom live in Pakistan, where it is mainly spoken in the Kalat region of Balochistan.
Brahui belongs, with Kurukh (Oraon) and Malto, to the northern subfamily of the Dravidan family of languages. It has been influenced by the Iranian languages spoken in the area, especially Balochi.[1]
Brahui is widely suggested to be 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. It has been suggested that Brahui might be a remnant of the language spoken in the Indus Valley Civilisation. Conversely, it has been indicated that the Brahuis could only have migrated to Balochistan from central India after 1000 CE. The absence of any older Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui support this hypothesis. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and has moved to the area from the west only about 1000 CE. [2]. One scholar places the migration only in the 13 or 14th century CE.[3]
According to a recent UNESCO report, Brahui is one of the 27 languages of Pakistan which 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).[4]
Notes
References
- Emeneau, Murray B. 1962. Bilingualism and structural borrowing. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106.5: 430-442.
External links
- English to Brahui word list
- Profile of the Brahui language
- Ethnologue report on the Brahui language
- Partial bibliography of scholarly works on Brahui
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