Brahui

The Brahui are a tribal, largely pastoral people of central Balochistan, in a belt from the Bolan Pass near Quetta through Kalat to the Arabian Sea, with smaller groups in Afghanistan and Iran.

Their language, Brahui, is a northern Dravidian tongue isolated far from the other Dravidian-speaking regions of India; linguists note sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto, and most hold that the Brahui are either a relict population from when Dravidian speech was more widespread, or migrants moving north from central India within the last thousand years. Brahui has no script of its own, written in the Perso-Arabic alphabet.

By the seventeenth century Brahui tribes were confederated around Kalat, and in the 1660s chieftain Ahmad Khan I founded the Khanate of Kalat, ruled by his Ahmadzai line; it peaked under Nasir Khan I in the late eighteenth century.