Language Contact in Balochistan: A Sociolinguistic Perspective of the Balochi Language by Dr. Hamid Ali Baloch

This book is the P.hd thesis of Dr.Hamid Ali Baloch. Balochi has been in contact with Median, Avestan and Old Persian in the first phase, with Parthian, Pahlavi (the Sassanian and Ashkanian Pahlavi) in the middle times and with the New Persian, Arabic, Bráhui, Pashto, Sindhi, Punjabi and Saraiki in the modern times. The Balochi language, during the process of its evolution, has lost a considerable number of its lexicon, phonological, morphological and syntactic structures, borrowed contemporary lexicons, and balochicized the lexemes of contact languages and enriched the other languages lexically. This study takes a thorough analysis over the long process of Balochi language contact with other Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages and Semitic languages from time to time and search out that how the change occurred in the lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactical structure. Recently, with the initiation of the age of information technology and the geo-political changes in the Balochi speaking areas and demarcation of Baloch land by the despotic and authoritarian governments put the Balochi language structure in a critical situation. The recent internal and global language contact has let the Balochi language into a new challenging phase.