The Romanisation of Brahui and Balochi :: more than just Gaddafi vs. Qadhafi

Permalink: https://sites.google.com/site/sarvabhashin/articles/brahuiandbalochi

While surfing Wikipedia, I came across the article on the Brahui language. This article stated that the Brahui Language Board (BLB) has approved a new Roman orthography for the language.

At first glance, the orthography seems to suit the sound system of the language quite well. And presumably so, because it’s a constructed one, unlike English orthography, which has turned out the way it has due to it having had too many cooks over the years.

However, what is particularly striking is the use of the accented or diacritical characters in the orthography. All such characters are either from the Latin-1 Supplement or Latin Extended-A subranges of Unicode.

This seems a rather pragmatic choice, as the characters in these subranges are used by a number of European languages and therefore, are present in many fonts available.

However, this also means that the orthography varies markedly from the general systems of romanisation used for South Asian languages (Hunterian, IAST, National Library at Calcutta romanisation (NLC), ISO 15919) in its use of diacritical characters.

Typically, these romanisation schemes feature a number of characters either from the Latin Extended Additional subrange, or that are not encoded separately in Unicode at all and need to be entered as a base letter + diacritic combination (see this link on ‘precomposed’ and ‘decomposed’ characters in Unicode).

The table below shows some of the variations present in the Brahui orthography as compared to one of the ‘standard’ transliterations for a particular letter/sound –

If the letters in the first column above show up properly on your computer/device, and the ones in the second column don’t, then this probably vindicates the BLB’s choice of choosing letters that would show up correctly on as many already existing devices as possible.

Here’s where the spanner gets thrown into the works –

Apparently a system for romanising the Balochi language – a language spoken in the same region as Brahui, and with a very similar sound system – has also been decided upon (see this link). Curiously, all the diacritical letters chosen for Balochi romanisation are also from the Unicode subgroups used for Brahui, but different from the letters used for Brahui (and of course from any existing Indic romanisation system).

This scenario throws up two questions –

– Considering that Brahui and Balochi are spoken in the same region (Balochistan, Pakistan), have a large number of speakers bilingual in both languages and most importantly, share a very similar phonology, why couldn’t there have been more cooperation in choosing Roman orthographies for these languages? The result would most likely have been a single romanisation system suitable for both languages.

– What is the use of the various existing South Asian language romanisation systems, if they are being bypassed for individually tailored romanisations?

Brahui and Balochi aren’t alone in having faced romanisation woes. The various Turkic languages of Central Asia have had a similar story, and for a much longer time (see this Wikipedia article on how their orthographies have been tinkered with over the years).

However, most of these languages (Turkish, Azeri, Tatar) seem to have settled on more-or-less similar Roman orthographies, with the rebels being Uzbek and Turkmen.