Brahui Alphabet & Letters

Brahui (براہوئی) is commonly written right to left in a Perso-Arabic script following Urdu writing conventions. In order the letters are ا آ ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل ڷ م ن ں و ہ ء ی ے. As in Urdu and Arabic, letters join up and change shape at the start, middle and end of a word; Unicode stores one code per letter and the font draws the joined shapes, so the plain letters on this page are the ones to copy.

Several of these letters are there only for borrowed words. ث ح ذ ص ض ط ظ ع ق come from Arabic and appear in religious words and names such as محمد and قلات (Kalat); in Brahui they are said like the ordinary s, h, z, t, ʔ and k. Brahui's own sounds are written with پ p, چ ch, ژ zh, گ g, the retroflex ٹ ڈ ڑ, the Urdu-style ک (keheh) for k and the round ہ for h.

Short vowels are often left unwritten, as in Urdu. Brahui vowel spelling in the Arabic script is not fully consistent: long ā is written with آ at the beginning of a word and ا medially or finally; ی can mark ī (and y), final ے can mark ē, and و can mark ō or ū (and w). When a word could be misread, the marks zabar َ (a), zer ِ (i) and pesh ُ (u) spell out the short vowels, shadda ّ doubles a consonant and jazm ْ (sukūn) shows that no vowel follows. Brahui has only three short vowels, a, i and u, against five long ones, which is why these three marks are all it needs.

ڷ and the retroflex letters ٹ ڈ ڑ: what makes Brahui letters special

ڷ, lām with three dots above (Unicode U+06B7), writes the sound linguists spell /ɬ/: a voiceless lateral fricative made by forcing air past the sides of the tongue, the same sound as the Welsh ll in Llanelli. It is rare among the languages of South Asia, and Urdu, Balochi and Pashto have no letter for it, so it is the one Brahui letter missing from ordinary Urdu keyboards. Copy it from this page, and take care not to mix it up with its look-alikes ڵ (lām with a small v, used in Kurdish) or plain ل.

ٹ ڈ ڑ are the retroflex consonants, said with the tip of the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth: ٹ is a hard ṭ, ڈ a hard ḍ and ڑ a flapped ṛ. They are written exactly as in Urdu, with a small ط on top of ت, د and ر. In Latin transcription of Brahui they are usually marked with a dot below: ṭ, ḍ, ṛ.

ے (baṛī ye) can mark final ē. In Urdu orthography, ں (nūn ghunna) marks nasalization of the preceding vowel, not an ordinary final /n/. ء hamza can mark a vowel break; in براہوئی the hamza is written above yeh as ئ.

How to type the Brahui alphabet: keyboard, phone and codes

There is no Brahui layout built into Windows or macOS, so people write Brahui with the Urdu keyboard, which already has every letter except ڷ. On Windows, open Settings, Time & language, Language & region, add Urdu and switch layouts with Windows + Space. On a Mac, add Urdu under System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources. On Android and iPhone, add the Urdu keyboard in the keyboard settings (Gboard and the iOS keyboard both have one).

For ڷ: in Microsoft Word type 06B7 and press Alt + X; on a Mac switch to the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 06B7; in HTML write ڷ. On a phone the quickest way is to copy ڷ once from this page and save it as a text replacement or clipboard pin. The rupee sign ₨ is U+20A8 (₨), although most Pakistanis simply write Rs or روپے.

Brahui uses the Urdu punctuation: the full stop is the dash-like ۔, not a dot, and the comma ،, question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛ are turned to face right-to-left text. Numbers are written either with 0–9 or with the Urdu digits ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, whose 4, 6 and 7 differ from the Arabic ٤ ٦ ٧; the digits run left to right even inside Brahui text.

Where Brahui is spoken, and Brahui and Tamil

Brahui is spoken mainly in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest and driest province, around Kalat, Khuzdar, Mastung and Quetta, with smaller communities across the border in southern Afghanistan and eastern Iran. CLDR estimates about 3.3 million speakers, nearly all of them in Pakistan, and most of them also speak Balochi, Urdu or Sindhi.

Searches for "Brahui and Tamil" ask the right question. Brahui is a Dravidian language, from the same family as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, although those are spoken in southern India, far to the south-east. Its closest relatives are Kurukh and Malto in eastern India. Brahui uses the Urdu-style Arabic script described above. Contact with Balochi, Persian and Sindhi has heavily influenced its vocabulary, while Balochi has also shaped its phonology, morphology and syntax; Brahui nonetheless remains a North Dravidian language related to Tamil. For the scripts of its neighbours see the Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi, Pashto and Persian collections, and the Pakistan collection for the country's flag and emoji.