Lasi, or Lassi, () is an Indo-Aryan language of Pakistan belonging to the Sindhi group and commonly counted as a dialect of Sindhi itself. It is spoken by the

Lasi people The Lasi are a Sindhi tribal group of Balochistan, Pakistan. They form 3.5% of the total population of the province (as of 1961), and are the predominant group in the lowlands of Lasbela District. They occupy a high social position and have traditi ...

Lasbela District Lasbela District (Urdu and bal, , Sindhi Lasi: لسبيلو) is a coastal district of Balochistan province of Pakistan. It is also called Sassi-Punnu Garh () among localites. History Alexander the Great passed through Lasbela on his way ...

Balochistan Balochistan ( ; bal, بلۏچستان; also romanised as Baluchistan and Baluchestan) is a historical region in Western and South Asia, located in the Iranian plateau's far southeast and bordering the Indian Plate and the Arabian Sea coastl ...

Dispute

Lasi has been disputed whether it is a language or a dialect of Sindhi. Most linguists agree that it is part of the wider

Sindhi languages The Sindhi languages or Sindhic are Sindhi and those Indo-Aryan languages closest to it. They include some varieties traditionally considered to be Gujarati: Lasi and Sindhi Bhil are sometimes added, but are commonly considered dialects of S ...

, not to be confused with the

Sindhi language Sindhi ( ; , ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language, withou ...

itself, which includes many languages that used to be dialects of Sindhi, such as

Jadgali Jaḍgālī is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Jadgal, an ethno-linguistic group of Pakistan and Iran. It is one of only two Indo-Aryan languages found on the Iranian plateau. It is a dialect of Sindhi most closely related to Lasi. The ...

and Kutchi.

Loanwords

Lasi is known to be using loanwords from other languages, primarily

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

as well as Balochi. More recently, many

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

and

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
''

words have entered the language.

Orthography

Lasi uses the same orthography as Sindhi except an extra letter, ۏ, which has been added to the

Balochi Standard Alphabet The Balochi Standard Alphabet ( bal, بلۏچی استانداردݔن اب),(Romanized: Balòci Estàndàrdèn Ab) is a writing system used for the Balochi language spoken in Balochistan, a region spanning parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. ...

. Many educated Lasi speakers use the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

in an effort to

romanise Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

the language.

References

Languages of Balochistan, Pakistan Languages of Pakistan Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages Sindhi language {{language-stub