Balochi

Balochi is a Northwestern Iranian language, the speech of the Baloch tribes whose original homeland lay east and south-east of the Caspian Sea and whose grammar preserves features close to Parthian and Median.

The Baloch began drifting eastward in the late Sasanian period, and by the 800s and 900s Arab geographers described them as living between Kerman, Khorasan, Sistan and Makran; the Seljuk invasion of Kerman in the 1100s pushed many tribes farther into the Makran coast and the hills that now form Balochistan.

The language survives as a dialect continuum of three main groups, Western Rakhshani, Southern Makrani and Eastern Soleimani. It had no written standard of its own until the 1800s, being set down in Persian script only when the need arose, while literacy among the Baloch ran instead to Persian and, in later centuries, Urdu.