Balti language

Balti (Nastaʿlīq script: , Tibetan script: སྦལ་ཏི།, ) is a Tibetic language natively spoken by the ethnic Balti people in the Baltistan region of Gilgit−Baltistan, Pakistan, Nubra Valley of the Leh district and in the Kargil district of Ladakh, India. The language differs from Standard Tibetan; many sounds of Old Tibetan that were lost in Standard Tibetan are retained in the Balti language. It also has a simple pitch accent system only in multi-syllabic words while Standard Tibetan has a complex and distinct pitch system that includes tone contour.

Demographics and distribution

Balti is spoken in most parts of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, Kargil and Nubra Ladakh in India. According to the Gilgit-Baltistan Scouts, Balti is mostly spoken in Skardu, Shigar, Gultari, Ghanche, Roundu and Kharmang parts of Gilgit-Baltistan. In the twin districts of Ladakh region (Kargil and Leh) it is spoken in Kargil city and its surrounding villages like Hardass, Lato, Karkitchhoo and Balti Bazar and in Leh – Turtuk, Bogdang, Tyakshi including Leh city and nearby villages. Balti language is also spoken by Balti immigrants in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad, Quetta and other cities of Pakistan. In India it is spoken in Dehradun, Nainital, Ambari, Shimla and other cities of Northern India by immigrants who have migrated from Baltistan, Kargil, and Nubra before the partition of India and Pakistan.

Classification and dialects

Historically, Buddhists in Leh refer to all Muslims in Ladakh as Balti. Balti language has four variants or dialects. Despite differentiation in pronunciation of vocabularies they are mutually intelligible for example ''Yuq'' is pronounced as ''Juq'' in the Purgi dialect of Kharmang and Kargil. Similarly for Milk ''Oma'' is pronounced in eastern Chorbat Nubra and Khaplu and Kharmang Kargil's Purgi dialect while ''Ona'' is pronounced in the western dialect of Skardu, Shigar and Rondu valley. Four variants or dialects of Balti language are:

# Eastern dialect of Chorbat and Nubra valley
# Central dialect of Khaplu valley
# Western dialect of Skardu, Shigar and Rondu.
# Southern dialect of Upper Kharmang and Kargil also called Purgi dialect.

Phonology

Consonants

*Allophones of include , and .
* can be realized as a flap .
* can be retroflex .

Vowels

* varies between an open back , an open-mid back and an open central .
* The mid can be as low as open-mid ().

Orthographies

The predominant writing system currently in use for Balti is the Perso-Arabic script, although there have been attempts to revive the Tibetan script, which was used between the 8th and the 16th centuries. Additionally, there are two, nowadays possibly extinct, indigenous writing systems and there have been proposals for the adoption of Roman– as well as Devanagari-based orthographies that were adjusted for writing Balti by the Central Institute of Indian Languages in the 1970s.

In 1985, Yousuf Hussainabadi added four new letters to the Tibetan script and seven new letters to the Persian script to adapt both of them according to the need of the Balti language. Two of the four added letters now stand included in the Tibetan Unicode alphabet.

Balti was written with a version of the Tibetan script from 727 AD, when Baltistan was conquered by Tibetans, until the last quarter of the 14th century, when the Baltis converted to Islam. Since then, Persian script replaced the Tibetan script, but the former had no letters for seven Balti sounds and was in vogue in spite of the fact that it was defective. Adding the seven new letters has now made it a complete script for Balti.

Recently, a number of Balti scholars and social activists have attempted to promote the use of the Tibetan Balti or "Yige" alphabet with the aim of helping to preserve indigenous Balti and Ladakhi culture and ethnic identity. Following a request from this community, the September 2006 Tokyo meeting of ISO/IEC 10646 WG2 agreed to encode two characters which are invented by Abadi (U+0F6B TIBETAN LETTER KKA and TIBETAN U+0F6C LETTER RRA) in the ISO 10646 and Unicode standards in order to support rendering Urdu