Brokpa
ethnic group
The Brokpa (Tibetan: འབྲོག་པ་, Wylie: ’brog pa, THL: drok pa), sometimes called Minaro, is an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group mostly found in the Indian-administered union territory of Ladakh around the villages of Dha and Hanu. Some of the community is also across the Line of Control in the Pakistan-administered Baltistan, in the villages around Ganokh. They speak an Indo-Aryan language called Brokskat. The Brokpa are mostly Vajrayana Buddhist but some are Muslim.
Name
According to the British Raj commentators, the Baltis gave the name "Brogpa" to the Dardic people living among them. The term means "highlander"; the Brogpa tended to occupy the higher pasture lands in the valleys. Frederic Drew states, "Wherever the Dards are in contact with Baltis or with Bhots, these others call them (...) Brokpa or Blokpa." As Tibetan language pronunciation varies by region, the same name is pronounced by Ladakhis as Drokpa or Dokpa.
Over time, the term "Brokpa" fell out of use in Baltistan and the Drass area in favour of ethnic labels such as "Dards" and "Shins". Only the Brokpa of the lower Indus valley in Ladakh Dah Hanu region retain the name, and their language is called Brokskat. They use the endonym "Minaro".
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1561807. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brokpa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.