Rakhshani dialect

Elfenbein divides the Rakhshani dialect into three categories:^[1][5]

• Kalati (areas between Las Bela in the north of Karachi to Mastung in the south of Quetta Chaghi and Kharan (northern areas of Balochistan, Pakistan, including Noshki, Dalbandin, Kharan, and Kalat).
• Panjguri (southern and southwestern areas of Afghanistan, mainly the areas around the Helmand River).
• Sarhaddi (an area that extends from the east to Dalbandin in Pakistan and from the northeast to Chahar Burjak in Afghanistan, and includes Merv in the Republic of Turkmenistan and Sistan in Iran, with Nosratabad in Balochistan, Iran, forming its southernmost part).

Western Balochi has 21 consonant phonemes and 6 vowel phonemes.

In the Rakhshani dialect, the infinitive noun is often formed from the past participle and ends in -tin. The active adjective, the future passive adjective (= imperative adjective) and the active noun are formed by adding the suffixes ān-, -agī(g) and -ōk to the present participle, respectively, and the passive adjective is formed by adding the suffix -a(g) to the past participle.^[11][12]

In some dialects of Balochi spoken in Western Balochistan the construction employs the verb twánag (past stem twánt) ‘to be able to’ + present-future subjunctive forms of the main verb. Twánag ‘to be able to’ is conjugated as a transitive verb.^[8]

The western balochi dialects have -ay for the Genitive and -ârā or -ānā for the Object.^[8]

Western Balochi dialects are moving from a split ergative toward a nominative - accusative (NOM- ACC) system.^[13] The subject is marked as nominative except for the past tense constructions where the subject of a transitive verb is marked as oblique and the verb agrees with the object.^[14] Balochi, like many Western Iranian languages, has lost the Old Iranian gender distinctions.^[1]

One of the sub-dialects of Rakhshani is the Sarhaddi(Balochi:سرحدی) dialect,^[11][7][15] which is more influenced by the Persian language and in which words, compounds and even grammatical structures of the Persian language are more commonly seen; that is, words from Modern Persian have been used after phonetic changes, as well as a number of Persian grammatical structures in this dialect. For example, words from Persian that end in "unvoiced ha" are considered after converting "e" to "g" and "e" is converted to "g" and used in the Sarhaddi. Sarhaddi includes infinitive, adverbial (subject noun and object noun) and infinitive noun, all of which are made from the verb stem and certain suffixes.^[16][17]

Northern Rakhshani has similarities with Sarhaddi, and Turkmen Rakhshani(Baloch of Turkmenistan) also originated from Balochi Rakhshani.^[15] The difference between Northern Rakhshani and Sarhaddi is that: In the past tense, the letter "g" has been removed from Northern Rakhshani, but it is still present in Sarhaddi.^[18]

Northern Rakhshani is spoken in the provinces of Nimroz, Farah, Helmand, Kandahar, Herat, and some northern provinces of Afghanistan.^[18][19]

The Baloch of Turkmenistan speak a dialect of the Balochi language that is very close to the Balochi dialect of the Baloch people of Afghanistan. The Balochi dialect of Turkmenistan belongs to the Rakhshani dialect.^[15]

Some verb constituents have gradually been eliminated from this dialect, but traces of them still exist. The third-person singular indefinite pronoun (or pronoun suffix) is often used with transitive verbs, and sometimes without transitive verbs.

Following are comparing the vocabulary of the Makrani and Sarhaddi dialects.

• Makrani dialect
• Eastern Balochi