Punjabi | |
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| |
Pronunciation | [pəɲˈdʒab̆.bi] |
Native to | Pakistan India |
Region | |
Ethnicity | Punjabis |
Native speakers | 148 million (2011–2017)[a] |
Early forms | |
Standard forms | |
Dialects |
|
Historical | |
Official status | |
Official language in | |
Regulated by | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | pa |
ISO 639-2 | pan |
ISO 639-3 | pan |
Glottolog | lahn1241 |
Linguasphere | 59-AAF-e |
Geographic distribution of Punjabi language in Pakistan and India. | |
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Punjabi,[g] sometimes spelled Panjabi,[h] is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Punjab region of Pakistan and India, spoken predominantly by the Punjabi people. With approximately 148 million native speakers, it is the eighth most spoken native language in the world. It also has a few million additional speakers which, along with native speakers, makes it the twelfth most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world and third in South Asia.[16]
Punjabi is the most widely-spoken first language in Pakistan, with 114.5 million native speakers,[i] according to the 2017 census and the 11th most widely-spoken in India, with 31.1 million native speakers, according to the 2011 census, with official status in the state of Punjab; additional in Haryana and West Bengal, as well as Delhi. It is the third most widely-spoken language in Canada, after the official languages English and French, with approximately a million native speakers (2.6% of the population). Apart from Canada, it is also spoken among other significant overseas diaspora, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and the Gulf states. It was also spoken in Afghanistan, by communities of Punjabi descent, in form of related dialects but is reported to be extinct in the present-day.[17]
Punjabi is a diagraphic language as it uses more than one writing system. In Pakistan, it is written using the Shahmukhi alphabet, based on the Perso-Arabic script; in India, it is written using the Gurmukhi alphabet, based on the Indic scripts. Other historical scripts and writing systems used for Punjabi include Laṇḍā (Multani and Mahajani), Tākri and Devanāgarī, which are no longer used.
Forming a part of the Northwestern branch of Indo-Aryan languages, alongside Sindhic, it is most closely related to other Indo-Aryan languages, namely Dogri, Kangri and Sindhi. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some Dardic and Central Indo-Aryan languages. It is the seventh-most spoken Indo-European language; third-most spoken Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan language after Hindi-Urdu and Bengali.
Modern Punjabi gradually developed from Old Punjabi, whose origin is still debated amongst linguists and historians, to Middle Punjabi and Early Modern Punjabi. It came under a degree of influence from Persian and Arabic during the medieval era with classical Punjabi literature. Today, the language has a wide variety of dialect groups which form a dialect continuum with one another. Standardized varieties based on the Majhi dialect (Central Punjabi), with influences from Western Punjabi in Pakistan and Eastern Punjabi in India, are used.
Punjabi is unusual among the Indo-Aryan languages and the broader Indo-European language family in its usage of lexical tone. It has been described as the only major tonal language of South Asia.
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The age of Old Punjabi: up to 1600 A.D. […] It is said that evidence of Old Punjabi can be found in the Granth Sahib.
Bhatia-2013
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Surpassing them all in the frequent subtlety of his linguistic choices, including the use of dialect forms as well as of frequent loanwords from Sanskrit and Persian, Guru Nanak combined this poetic language of the Sants with his native Old Punjabi. It is this mixture of Old Punjabi and Old Hindi which constitutes the core idiom of all the earlier Gurus.
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