BALOCHI LANGUAGE

also spelled BALUCHI, or BELUCHI, modern
Iranian language of the Indo-Iranian
group of the Indo-European language
family. Balochi speakers live mainly in an
area now composed of parts of
southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan that was once the historic
region of Balochistan. They also live in
Central Asia (near Merv, Turkmenistan)
and southwestern Afghanistan, and there are colonies in Oman, southern Arabia, and along the east coast of Africa as far south as Kenya.

Balochi is a Western Iranian language
that is closely related to Kurdish. Despite the vast area over which it is spoken, its six dialects (Rakhshani, Sarawani, Kechi, Lotuni, the Eastern Hill dialects, and the coastal dialects) are all believed to be mutually intelligible. There are an estimated 4,800,000 worldwide speakers of Balochi Mostly in (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran)