The Brahui, Brahvi or Brohi, are a Dravidian speaking ethnic group of about 2.2 million people with the vast majority found in Balochistan, Pakistan. They are also found in small numbers in Afghanistan and Iran, where they are native, but they are also found through their diaspora in other Middle Eastern states. They mainly occupy the area in Balochistan from Bolan Pass through the Bolan Hills to Ras Muari on the Arabian sea, separating the Baloch people of Balochistan to the west and the Sindhi people of Sindh in the east. The Brahuis are almost entirely Sunni Muslims. There is a varied pattern of language use among the Brahui: some of the constituent groups predominantly speak the Brahui language, a Dravidian language contrasting with the Indo-Iranian languages spoken throughout most of the region, some Brahuis are bilingual in Balochi and Brahui, while others are speakers only of Balochi.
Origins
The fact that other Dravidian languages only exist further south in India has led to several speculations about the origins of the Brahui. There are three hypotheses regarding the Brahui that have been proposed by academics. One theory is that the Brahui are a relict population of Dravidians, surrounded by speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, remaining from a time when Dravidian was more widespread. A second theory is that they migrated to Baluchistan from inner India during the early Muslim period of the 13th or 14th centuries. The third theory says the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from Central India after 1000 AD. The absence of any older Iranian influence in Brahui supports this last hypothesis. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary is a northwestern Iranian language, Baluchi, Sindhi and southeastern Iranian language, Pashto. However, the Brahui do not have higher genetic affinity with Dravidian populations in India than other neighboring Indo-Iranian Pakistanis. Pagani, et al., conclude that this shows that the Brahui, although speaking a Dravidian language, had their Dravidian genetic component completely replaced by Indo-Iranian speakers, suggesting that the Brahui are descendants of a previous relict population whose genomes were replaced when more recent Indo-Iranian speakers arrived in South Asia. Linguistic findings and oral histories of the Brahui however say otherwise.
Tribes
There are three groups of Brahui tribes. The "nucleus" consists of the Achmadzai, Gurguari, Iltazai, Kalandari, Kambrani, Mirwari, Rodeni and the Sumalari, which altogether account for only a small proportion of the total number of Brahuis. The majority of the population is divided up between the Jhalawan Brahuis, and the Sarawan Brahuis.
Language
The Brahui language is a Dravidian language, even though it is very far from South India. It is mainly spoken in the Kalat areas of Balochistan, Pakistan, and in Southern Afghanistan, as well as by an unknown very small number of expatriates in the Persian Gulf states, Turkmenistan, as well as Iranian Balochistan. It has three dialects: Sarawani, Jhalawani, and Chaghi The 2013 edition of Ethnologue reports that there are some 4.2 million speakers; 4 million live in Pakistan, mainly in the province of Balochistan. Due to its isolation, Brahui's vocabulary is only 15% Dravidian, while the remainder is dominated by Balochi, and Indo-Aryan languages. Brahui is generally written in the Perso-Arabic script and there is even a Latin alphabet that has been developed for use with Brahui.
Brahuis display a variety of Y-DNA haplogroups, the most important being haplogroup R1a1a-M17 - with its mass diffusion among populations of Central/South Asia and associated with the early eastern migrations of Indo-Iranian nomads. Haplogroup J, which is found among other South Asian peoples and more typical of Near-Eastern populations occurs at 28%. Other, relatively minor, low-frequency haplogroups among the Brahui are those of G, L, E1b1a, and N. These haplogroups show that the Brahui population genetics are largely indistinguishable from those of Indo-Iranian speakers which are adjacent to them, like the Balochi and Makrani, but different from those further away, such as Sindhi. According to Quintana-Murci et al., the Brahui population has a high prevalence of western Eurasian mtDNAs and the lowest frequency in the region of haplogroup M*, which is common among the Dravidian-speaking Indians. So the possibility of the Dravidian presence in Baluchistan originating from recent entry of Dravidians of India should be excluded. It also shows their maternal gene pool is similar to Indo-Iranian speakers. The present Brahui population may have originated from ancient Indian Dravidian-speakers who may have relocated to Baluchistan and admixed with locals; however, no historical record supports this. So it is suggested that they are the last northern survivors of a larger Dravidian-speaking region before Indo-Iranian arrived. This would, if true, reinforce the proto-Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis.
