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Rakhshani( Balochi:) also termed Western Balochi is a Balochi dialect. The dialect has several important subdialects and spoken predominantly in
Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...
,
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...
,
Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
and
Turkmenistan Turkmenistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, east and northeast, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest and the Caspian Sea to the west. Ash ...
. The
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...
website has classified the dialect under the western Balochi.


Dialects

Elfenbein divides the Rakhshani dialect into three categories: *Kalati (areas between Las Bela in the north of Karachi to Mastung in the south of Quetta Chaghi and Kharan (northern areas of Balochistan, Pakistan, including Noshki, Dalbandin, Kharan, and Kalat). *Panjguri(southern and southwestern areas of Afghanistan, mainly the areas around the Helmand River). *Sarhaddi (an area that extends from the east to Dalbandin in Pakistan and from the northeast to Chahar Burjak in Afghanistan, and includes
Merv Merv (, ', ; ), also known as the Merve Oasis, was a major Iranian peoples, Iranian city in Central Asia, on the historical Silk Road, near today's Mary, Turkmenistan. Human settlements on the site of Merv existed from the 3rd millennium& ...
in the Republic of Turkmenistan and Sistan in Iran, with Nosratabad in Balochistan, Iran, forming its southernmost part).


Phonology

Western Balochi has 21
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
phonemes and 6
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
phonemes.


Vowles

three short and five long vowels for the Rakhshani dialect as ə, y, w, a, i, u, e, o (adapted: a, i, u, aː, iː, uː eː, oː). nasalized ones a͂, e͂ , ı͂ , o͂, u͂, “of which only a͂, e͂ are common in the Rakhshani dia-lects.


Consonants

The
consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
/p/, /t/, /t̥/, /č/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /d̥/, /ǰ/, /g/, /(ƒ)/, /s/, /š/, /(x)/, /h/, /z/, /ž/, /(ġ)/, /m/, /n/, /r/, /r̥/, /l/, /w/ and /y/ are articulated as alveolar in Western Balochi. The plosives /t/ and /d/ are dental in both dialects. The symbol ń is used to denote nasalization of the preceding vowel. The consonants /s/, /z/, /n/, /ɾ/ and /l/ are articulated as alveolar in Western Balochi. The consonants /f x ġ/ in the Rakhshani dialect often remain, but in Makrani they become /p/, /k/ or /h/, and /g/, respectively. In addition, /f/ occurs in a few words in Southern Balochi. /x/ ( voiceless velar
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
) in some loanwords in Southern Balochi corresponding to /ʁ/ (voiced uvular fricative) in Western Balochi.


Syllable

In Western Balochi dialects the stress is on the last syllable of the word as a rule. The pronominal suffixes and the present copula, which are enclitic except for the individuation marker -e. For inflected forms of the
interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence (linguistics), sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its Declarative ...
pronouns č ē 'what' are stressed on the first
syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
. The negative
prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...
na- and the prohibitive prefix ma- attract the stress. Verb forms with the prefix b(i) likewise have the stress on the first syllable thus on the first syllable of the stem if the vowel of the prefix is omitted, see and the nominal part of complex predicates takes the phrase stress. Inflected forms of the interrogative pronouns ce 'what' are stressed on the first syllable, however. There are also a few adverbs that are stressed on the first syllable.


Grammar

In the Rakhshani dialect, the infinitive noun is often formed from the past participle and ends in -tin. The active adjective, the future passive adjective (= imperative adjective) and the active noun are formed by adding the suffixes ān-, -agī(g) and -ōk to the present participle, respectively, and the passive adjective is formed by adding the suffix -a(g) to the past participle. In some dialects of Balochi spoken in Western Balochistan the construction employs the verb twánag (past stem twánt) ‘to be able to’ + present-future subjunctive forms of the main verb. Twánag ‘to be able to’ is conjugated as a transitive verb. The western balochi dialects have -ay for the
Genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...
and -ârā or -ānā for the Object. Western Balochi dialects are moving from a split ergative toward a nominative - accusative ( NOM- ACC ) system. The subject is marked as nominative except for the past tense constructions where the subject of a
transitive verb A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose ...
is marked as oblique and the verb agrees with the object. Balochi, like many Western Iranian languages, has lost the Old Iranian gender distinctions.


Pronouns


Sarhaddi

One of the sub-dialects of Rakhshani is the Sarhaddi( Balochi:) dialect, which is more influenced by the
Persian language Persian ( ), also known by its endonym and exonym, endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), is a Western Iranian languages, Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian subdivision ...
and in which words, compounds and even grammatical structures of the Persian language are more commonly seen; that is, words from Modern Persian have been used after phonetic changes, as well as a number of Persian grammatical structures in this dialect. For example, words from Persian that end in "unvoiced ha" are considered after converting "e" to "g" and "e" is converted to "g" and used in the Sarhaddi. Sarhaddi includes
infinitive Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs that do not show a tense. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all ...
,
adverbial In English grammar, an adverbial ( abbreviated ) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb. (The word ''adverbial'' itself is also used as a ...
(subject noun and object noun) and infinitive noun, all of which are made from the verb stem and certain suffixes.


Northern Rakhshani

Northern Rakhshani has similarities with Sarhaddi , and Turkmen Rakhshani( Baloch of Turkmenistan) also originated from Balochi Rakhshani. The difference between Northern Rakhshani and Sarhaddi is that: In the past tense, the letter "g" has been removed from Northern Rakhshani, but it is still present in Sarhaddi. Northern Rakhshani is spoken in the provinces of Nimroz, Farah, Helmand, Kandahar,
Herat Herāt (; Dari/Pashto: هرات) is an oasis city and the third-largest city in Afghanistan. In 2020, it had an estimated population of 574,276, and serves as the capital of Herat Province, situated south of the Paropamisus Mountains (''Se ...
, and some northern provinces of Afghanistan.


Rakhshani of Turkmenistan

The Baloch of Turkmenistan speak a dialect of the Balochi language that is very close to the Balochi dialect of the Baloch people of Afghanistan. The Balochi dialect of Turkmenistan belongs to the Rakhshani dialect. Some verb constituents have gradually been eliminated from this dialect, but traces of them still exist. The third-person singular indefinite pronoun (or pronoun suffix) is often used with transitive verbs, and sometimes without transitive verbs.


Vocabulary

Following are comparing the vocabulary of the Makrani and Sarhaddi dialects.


See also

* Makrani dialect * Eastern Balochi


References


External links

* Collett, N. A
A grammar, phrase book and vocabulary of Baluchi
(as spoken in the Sultanate of Oman). 2nd ed. amberley .A. Collett 1986. * Mumtaz Ahmad
Baluchi glossary
a Baluchi-English glossary: elementary level. Kensington, Md.: Dunwoody Press, 1985.

– translate Balochi words to or from English, Persian, Spanish, Finnish and Swedish
iJunoon English to Balochi Dictionary

EuroBalúči
– Baluchi alphabet, grammar and music * *Jahani, C. 2019
A Grammar of Modern Standard Balochi
{{Iranian languages balochi language Western Iranian languages