Balti (Nastaʿlīq script: بلتی, Tibetan script: སྦལ་ཏི།, Wylie: sbal ti) is a Tibetic language spoken by the Balti people in the Baltistan region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, the Nubra Valley of Leh district and in the Kargil district of Ladakh, India.[4] It is quite different 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[5] while Standard Tibetan has a complex and distinct pitch system that includes tone contour.
The major issue facing the development of Balti literature is its centuries-long isolation from Tibet, owing to political divisions and strong religious differences and even from its immediate neighbor Ladakh for the last 50 years. Separated from its linguistic kin, Balti is under pressure from more dominant languages such as Urdu. This is compounded by the lack of a suitable means of transcribing the language following the abandonment of its original Tibetan script. The Baltis do not have the awareness to revive their original script and there is no institution that could restore it and persuade the people to use it again.[citation needed] Even if the script is revived, it would need modification to express certain Urdu phonemes that occur in common loanwords within Balti.
Examples of poetry: