There was a historic disagreement on whether they form part of a single language group within the Indo-Aryan language family, with early classifications assigning the western dialects to the Northwestern zone and the eastern ones to the Central zone; but broadly all modern classifications agree on their forming a single group within the Northwestern zone.[10][11][12]
According to Jagtar Singh Grewal, the Punjabi dialects started emerging between the fall of the empire of Harsha in the 7th century and the rise of the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century. Amir Khusrau referred to the language spoken in the Lahore region as Lahauri, which later became known as Punjabi. Farid composed works in his Multani dialect.[14] The varieties of "Greater Punjabi" have a number of characteristics in common, for example the preservation of the Prakrit double consonants in stressed syllables.[15]
Geographic distribution
The literary standards that have developed on the basis of dialects are: Majhi-based Standard Punjabi in eastern and central Punjab, Saraiki in the southwest, and Pahari-Pothwari and Hindko in the northwest.[16] A distinction is usually made between Eastern Punjabi in the east and Lahnda (Western Punjabi) in the west. Lahnda typically subsumes the Saraiki and Hindko varieties, with Jhangvi, Shahpuri, and Dhanni being intermediate between other Lahnda varieties and Eastern Punjabi. Pahari-Pothwari shares features with both Lahnda and Central/Eastern Punjabi.[17]
Pakistan
Punjabi, Hindko and Saraiki are listed separately in the census enumerations of Pakistan.[18] According to the 2017 Census of Pakistan, there are 80,536,390 Punjabi speakers; 25,324,637 Saraiki speakers and 5,065,879 Hindko speakers.[19] Saraiki was added to the census in 1981, and Hindko was added in 2017, prior to which both were represented by "Punjabi" in general. In areas such as Gujar Khan and Rawalpindi where Pothwari is the spoken variety,[20] speakers significantly selected "Punjabi" instead of "Other" in all previous census enumeration.[21]
Azad Kashmir
In a statistical survey carried about by a proxy of the Government of Azad Kashmir, most speakers of Azad Kashmir spoke a variety of Pahari-Pothwari, while Majhi (represented simply as "Punjabi") attained a plurality in the Bhimber district.[22] Some Pahari-Pothwari speakers in Azad Kashmir, like the ones in Pothohar, simply refer to their mother tongue as "Punjabi".[23]
India
Poster claiming to depict dialects of Punjabi, displayed at Sadda Pind, Amritsar, Punjab, India
In India, Punjabi is listed as a constitutional language and is counted in the census returns. According to the 2011 Census of India, there are 33,124,726 Punjabi speakers which includes the varieties of Bagri (1,656,588 speakers) Bilaspuri (295,805 speakers) and Bhateali (23,970 speakers).[24] Bagri is spoken in parts of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Bilaspuri and Bhateali are spoken in Himachal Pradesh. The status of Bagri is split between Punjabi and Rajasthani in the census returns with options available under Punjabi and Rajasthani.[25]
Gusain (1991) places Bagri as a Rajasthani dialect.[26] Similarly, the identities of Bilaspuri and Bhateali are also split, in their case, between Punjabi and Dogri.[27][28]
Lahnda (Western Punjabi) varieties are enumerated separately in the census returns in India with 108,791 speakers listed in the 2011 census. The varieties listed under Lahnda are 'Bahawalpuri' (29,253 speakers); 'Multani' which is described as 'Hindi Multani' (61,722 speakers) and unclassified (17,816 speakers).[29] 'Poonchi' is spoken in Jammu; and is listed under Lahnda as it, together with 'Bahwalpuri' and 'Multani' satisfies the "criterion of 10,000 or more speakers at the all India level".[30]
Historically, Dogri was considered to be a dialect of Punjabi spoken primarily in Jammu.[31] In the 1941 Census, Dogri was listed under Punjabi.[32] Since 2003, Dogri is listed as an independent language in the constitution of India.[33] According to the 2011 Census - India, there are 2,596,767 Dogri speakers. Similar to Dogri, the Kangri language spoken in Himachal Pradesh was regarded as a Punjabi dialect but since 1971, it has been reclassified under Hindi.[34] There were 1,117,342 Kangri speakers listed in the 2011 Census- India. Despite the independent status of Dogri and reclassification of Kangri, both languages are claimed to fall within Punjabi by some writers.[35][36] Others place Dogri and Kangri within the Western Pahari group.[37] Eberle et al. (2020) believe Dogri and Kangri are related to Eastern Punjabi and place these languages in a group of related languages descended from an intermediate division of Indo-Aryan languages.[38]
↑Haldar, Gopal (2000). Languages of India. New Delhi: National Book Trust, India. p.149. ISBN9788123729367. 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, Tej K. (2013). Punjabi: A Cognitive-Descriptive Grammar (Reprinted.). London: Routledge. p.XXV. ISBN9781136894602. As an independent language Punjabi has gone through the following three stages of development: Old Punjabi (10th to 16th century). Medieval Punjabi (16th to 19th century), and Modern Punjabi (19th century to Present).
↑Christopher Shackle; Arvind Mandair (2013). "0.2.1 – Form". Teachings of the Sikh Gurus: selections from the Scriptures (Firsted.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN9781136451089. 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.
↑Frawley, William (2003). International encyclopedia of linguistics (2nded.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.423. ISBN9780195139778.
↑Austin, Peter (2008). One thousand languages: living, endangered, and lost. Berkeley: University of California Press. p.115. ISBN9780520255609.
↑Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru; S. N. Sridhar (2008). Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. p.411. ISBN9781139465502.
↑Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2020). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (23rded.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
↑Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Indo-Aryan". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
↑Pothwari has previously been regarded as part of "Lahnda", but Shackle (1979, pp.201) argues that it shares features with both groups. Jhangvi (Wagha 1997, p.229) and Shahpuri (Shackle 1979, pp.201) are transitional between Saraiki and Punjabi.
↑Statistical Year Book 2020(PDF). Muzaffarabad: AJ&K Bureau Of Statistics. pp.131, 140. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
↑Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism. (2007). (n.p.): Taylor & Francis
↑Language Sciences. (1991). Japan: International Christian University Language Sciences Summer Institute.
↑Grewal, J.S. and Banga, Indu (1998) Punjab in prosperity and violence: administration, politics, and social change, 1947-1997. K.K. Publishers for Institute of Punjab Studies, Chandigarh
Birmani, Ali H.; Ahmed, Fasih (2017). "Language of the Khetrans of Barkhan of Pakistani Balochistan: A preliminary description". Lingua. 191–192: 3–21. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2016.12.003. ISSN0024-3841.
Burling, Robbins. 1970. Man's many voices. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Ethnologue. Indo-Aryan Classification of 219 languages that have been assigned to the Indo-Aryan grouping of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages.
Rahman, Tariq. 2006. The role of English in Pakistan with special reference to tolerance and militancy. In Amy Tsui et al., Language, policy, culture and identity in Asian contexts. Routledge. 219–240.
Rensch, Calvin R. (1992). "The Language Environment of Hindko-Speaking People". In O'Leary, Clare F.; Rensch, Calvin R.; Hallberg, Calinda E. (eds.). Hindko and Gujari. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics. ISBN969-8023-13-5.
Shackle, C. 1970. Punjabi in Lahore. Modern Asian Studies, 4 (3):239–267. Available online at JSTOR.
Shackle, Christopher (2003). "Panjabi". In Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.). The Indo-Aryan languages. Routledge language family series. Y. London: Routledge. pp.581–621. ISBN978-0-7007-1130-7.
