Panjabi language

All you want to know about Panjabi language

Punjabi
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ پنجابی Pañjābī
Spoken in: Pakistan, India, UK, USA, Canada, Burma, UAE, Philippines and other countries with Punjabi migrants 
Region: Punjab
Total speakers: Punjabi (excluding Siraiki): 90 million native speakers (27 m. in India (1991), 61-62 million in Pakistan (2000)) 
Ranking: 11
(excluding Siraiki)
Language family: Indo-European
 Indo-Iranian
  Indo-Aryan
   Punjabi 
Writing system: Shahmukhi, Gurmukhi, sometimes Devanagari 
Official status
Official language in: Flag of Pakistan Punjab, Flag of India Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: pa
ISO 639-2: pan
ISO 639-3: variously:
pan – Punjabi (Eastern)
pnb – Punjabi (Western)
pmu – Punjabi (Mirpuri)
Indic script
 This page contains Indic text. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts. More...

Punjabi (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ in Gurmukhi script, پنجابی in Shahmukhi script, Pañjābī in transliteration) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region (now split between India and Pakistan) and their diasporas. Speakers include adherents of the religions of Islam, Sikhism, and Hinduism. By a conservative classification of its member dialects (excluding Siraiki), it has over 90 million native speakers, which makes it the 11th most widely spoken language in the world. Unusually for an Indo-European language, Punjabi is tonal; the tones arose as a result of the loss of the voiced aspirate consonant series found in most Indo-Aryan languages. The written standard for Punjabi for at least 300 years has been based on the Majhi dialect, the dialect of the historical region of Majha,[1] which spans the Amritsar District and Gurdaspur District of the Indian State of Punjab and the Lahore District of the Pakistani Province of Punjab.[2]

Contents

History

Punjabi is a descendant of the Sauraseni, which was the chief language of northern medieval India[3][4][5]

Punjabi emerged as an independent language in the 11th century from the Sauraseni Apabhramsa.[6] However, the literary tradition in Punjabi started much later, under the influence of Guru Nanak ji, the first Sikh Guru.

Guru Arjan Dev ji, the fifth Sikh Guru, compiled Sri Guru Granth Sahib. A substantial portion of the Guru Granth Sahib is written in Punjabi, although it is intespersed with Hindi languages (such as Brajbhasha and Khariboli), and also contains Sanskrit, Persian and Marathi words.[7] Guru Gobind Singh ji also composed Chandi di Var in Punjabi, although most of his works are composed in other languages like Braj bhasha and Persian.

Between 1600 and 1850, Sikh, Hindu and Muslim Sufi writers composed many works in Punjabi. The most famous Punjabi Sufi poet was Baba Bulleh Shah, who wrote in the Kafi style. Waris Shah's rendition of the tragic love story of Heer Ranjha is among the most popular medieval Punjabi works. Other popular tragic love stories are Sohni Mahiwal, Mirza Sahiba and Sassi Punnun. Shah Mohammad's Jangnama is another fine piece of poetry that gives an eyewitness account of the First Anglo-Sikh War that took place after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

The Punjabi identity was affected by the communal sentiments in the 20th century. Bhai Vir Singh, a major figure in the movement for the revival of Punjabi literary tradition, started insisting that the Punjabi language was the exclusive preserve of the Sikhs.[8] The Hindu and Muslim Punjabis began to assert that their mother tongue were Hindu and Urdu respectively. After Partition of India in 1947, Punjabi was sidelined by Urdu in the Pakistani Punjab. With the Partition, the Indian Punjab became Hindi-majority. The movement for a Punjabi Suba led to trifurcation of Indian Punjab into three states: Punjab (India), Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Punjabi was made the official language of Punjab and Delhi (NCR) and has flourished greatly.

The famous Indian Punjabi poets in modern times are Mohan Singh, Pritam Singh Safir, I C Nanda, Balwant Gargi, Shiv Batavi, Surjit Patar and Amrita Pritam (winner of Jnanpith Award).

In the recent past, Punjabi language has achieved great popularity in India and worldwide through Punjabi music and dance.

Dialects: linguistic classification

In Indo-Aryan dialectology generally, the presence of transitional dialects creates problems in assigning some dialects to one or another "language".[9][10] However, over the last century there has usually been little disagreement when it comes to defining the core region of the Punjabi language. In modern India, the states are largely designed to encompass the territories of major languages with an established written standard. Thus Indian Punjab is the Punjabi language state (in fact, the neighboring state of Haryana, which was part of Punjab state in 1947, was split off from it because it is a Hindi speaking region). Some of its major urban centers are Ludhiana, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Jalandhar, and Patiala. In neighboring Punjab province in Pakistan, the Punjabi speaking territory spans the central eastern districts, and includes Lahore, the largest Punjabi speaking city of all.

Siraiki

Siraiki and Punjabi are said to be mutually intelligible; but the census of Pakistan has classified them as different languages since the 1970s.[11] Siraiki had over 13 million speakers as of 2000. Siraiki dialects are highly divergent from typical Punjabi. Grierson included them within his proposed classification, the "Lahnda" language (see below).

List of Punjabi dialects

There are many dialects of Punjabi and they all form part of a dialect continuum, merging to the southwest with Sindhi (or with Siraiki if Siraiki dialects are held not to be Punjabi dialects), to the east and south with Hindi, and to the north with Dogri. The main dialects of Punjabi are Majhi, Doabi, Malwai and Powadhi in India and the east of Pakistani Punjab, and Multani in the west of Pakistani Punjab.

Punjabi University, Patiala, State of Punjab, India takes a very liberal definition of Punjabi in that it includes the Siraiki dialects and also some dialects to the north and northwest of the universally agreed Punjabi language area (among the latter, especially Dogri and Pothohari/Pothwari). Accordingly, the University has issued the following list of dialects of Punjabi:[12]

Some of these dialects, such as Dogri, Siraiki and Hindko are sometimes considered separate languages, and are classified in different zones or divisions of Indo-Aryan:

The "Lahnda" construct

The name "Punjab" means "five rivers" and refers to five major eastern tributaries of the Indus River. The venerable historical Punjab region, now split between Pakistan and India, is defined physiographically by the Indus River and these five tributaries. One of the five, the Beas River, is a tributary of another, the Sutlej River, and lies entirely in present day India, well within the eastern half of historical Punjab.

In 1919, Grierson came to the conclusion that a group of dialects spoken west of the Punjab heartland, in the Indus valley itself and on the lower reaches of the other four tributaries (excluding the Beas River), and known collectively as "western Punjabi" in fact constituted a language distinct from Punjabi. He christened this group of dialects "Lahindā" in a volume of the LSI published in 1919.[13] (The -ā ending has on its own given rise to a bit of terminological confusion because, since "Lahnda" is a noun, not an adjective, some linguists of India have preferred to use the adjective "Lahndi" for the sake of consistency with the way of naming the other Indo-Aryan dialects and languages.) Grierson tentatively identified the boundary between Punjabi and "Lahnda" as a north-south line running from the Gujranwala District to the former Montgomery District (near the town on Sahiwal), well west of Lahore.[14]

Later dialectologists have criticized details of the Lahnda/Lahndi construct or even denied its validity entirely. For most workers in this field, however, the Lahnda controversy has had little relevance to classification of the dialects of the metropolis of Lahore and of other localities along the Pakistan-India border. In the aftermath of the Partition of 1947, some investigators supposed that the Punjabi speakers in new Pakistan might give up their native dialects and adopt one or another "Lahnda" dialect; but this did not occur.[15]

Classification by Ethnologue

Because of the stature of Ethnologue as a widely accepted authority on the identification and classification of dialects and languages, their divergent views of the geographical distribution and dialectal naming of the Punjabi language merit mention. They designate what tradition calls "Punjabi" as "eastern Panjabi" and they have implicitly adopted the belief (contradicted by other specialists[16]) that the language border between "western Panjabi" and "eastern Panjabi" has shifted since 1947 to coincide with the international border.[17]

Geographic distribution

Punjabi is the official language of the Indian state of Punjab and the shared state capital Chandigarh[18]. It is one of the official second languages of the states of Delhi and Haryana.[19] Punjabi is the predominant language in the Punjab province of Pakistan, although it has no official status at the national level in Pakistan, where in any case the preferred languages of the elite are Urdu and English.[citation needed]

Punjabi is also spoken as a minority language in several other countries where Punjabis have emigrated in large numbers, such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom (where it is the second most commonly used language[20]) and Canada, where in recent times Punjabi has grown fast and has now become the fourth most spoken language.[21]

Punjabi is the preferred language of most Sikhs (most of their religious literature being written in it) and Punjabi Hindus and Punjabi muslims living in Pakistan. It is the usual language of Bhangra music, which has recently gained wide popularity both in South Asia and abroad.

See also: States of India by Punjabi speakers

Phonology

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close iː uː
Near-close ɪ ʊ
Close-mid eː ə oː
Open ɛː ɑː ɔː
Consonants
Bilabial Labio-
dental		 Dental/
Alveolar		 Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ɳ ɲ ŋ
Plosive and
Affricate		 voiceless p t̪ ʈ ʧ k
voiceless aspirated pʰ t̪ʰ ʈʰ ʧʰ kʰ
voiced b d̪ ɖ ʤ g
Fricative (f) s (z) (ʃ) ɦ
Flap ɾ ɽ
Approximant ʋ l ɭ j
Tone

Panjabi has a three-way tone contrast that developed from the lost murmured series of consonants. These are phonetically rising or rising-falling contours which cover one or two syllables, but can be distinguished phonemically as high, mid, and low.

An initial historically murmured consonant became tenuis and left a low tone on the following couple syllables: ghoṛā [kòːɽɑ̀ː] "horse". A stem-final murmured consonant became voiced and left a high tone on the preceding couple syllables: māgh [mɑ́ːɡ] "October". A stem-medial murmured consonant which appeared after a short vowel and before a long vowel became voiced and left a low tone on the following couple syllables: maghāṇā [məɡɑ̀ːɳɑ̀ː] "to be lit". Other syllables and words have mid tone.[22]

Grammar

Main article: Punjabi grammar

Writing system

There are several different scripts used for writing the Punjabi language, depending on the region and the dialect spoken, as well as the religion of the speaker. In the Punjab province of Pakistan, the script used is Shahmukhi (from the mouth of the Kings), a modified version of Persian-Nasta'liq (Arabic) script. But for all practical purposes the script in implementation is identical to Urdu. In the Indian state of Punjab, Sikhs and others use the Gurmukhī (from the mouth of the Gurus) script. Hindus, and those living in neighbouring Indian states such as Haryana and Himachal Pradesh sometimes use the Devanāgarī script. Gurmukhī and Shahmukhi scripts are the most commonly used for writing Punjabi and are considered the official scripts of the language.

Role in Education

Notable authors

See List of Punjabi authors.

Dictionaries

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Majhi" is a word used with reference to many other places and dialects in north India; these have nothing to do with the Majhi dialect of Punjabi
  2. ^ Shackle 1970:240
  3. ^ India's culture through the ages by Mohan Lal Vidyarthi. Published by Tapeshwari Sahitya Mandir, 1952. Page 148: "From the aprabhmsh of Sauraseni are derived Punjabi, Western Hindi, Rajasthani and Gujerati [sic]..."
  4. ^ National Communication and Language Policy in India By Baldev Raj Nayar. Published by F. A. Praeger, 1969. Page 35. "...Sauraseni Aprabhramsa from which have emerged the modern Western Hindi and Punjabi."
  5. ^ The Sauraseni Pr?krit Language. "This Middle Indic language originated in Mathura, and was the main language used in drama in Northern India in the medieval period. Two of its descendants are Hindi and Punjabi."
  6. ^ Language India. Volume 5 : 12 December 2005. Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
  7. ^ The Adi Granth: Or The Holy Scriptures Of The Sikhs by Ernest Trumpp. 2004. ISBN 8121502446.
  8. ^ Punjabis Without Punjabi By Ishtiaq Ahmed. The News, 5/24/2008.
  9. ^ Masica 1991:25
  10. ^ Burling 1970:chapter on India
  11. ^ Rahman 2006.
  12. ^ Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature and Culture
  13. ^ Shackle 1970:240
  14. ^ Masica 1991:20
  15. ^ Masica 1991:20
  16. ^ e.g., Shackle 1970:240, Panjabi University in India, see below
  17. ^ Ethnologue country pages for India and Pakistan; page for Indo-Aryan languages
  18. ^ The city of Chandigarh is the capital of two Indian states, Punjab and Haryana
  19. ^ The Times of India - "Punjabi, Urdu made official languages in Delhi" 25 June 2003
  20. ^ "Punjabi Community". The United Kingdom Parliament.
  21. ^ Punjabi is 4th most spoken language in Canada-Indians Abroad-The Times of India
  22. ^ Harjeet Singh Gill, "The Gurmukhi Script", p. 397. In Daniels and Bright, The World's Writing Systems. 1996.

References

  • 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.
  • Ethnologue. Languages of India
  • Ethnologue. Languages of Pakistan
  • Grierson, George A. 1904-1928. Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. Calcutta.
  • Masica, Colin. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge Univ. Press.
  • 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.
  • Shackle, C. 1970. Punjabi in Lahore. Modern Asian Studies, 4(3):239-267. Available online at JSTOR.

Further reading

  • Bhatia, Tej. 1993. Punjabi : a cognitive-descriptive grammar. Routledge. Series: Descriptive grammars.
  • Gill H.S. [Harjit Singh] and Gleason, H.A. 1969. A reference grammar of Punjabi. Revised edition. Patiala, Punjab, India: Languages Deparmtent, Punjab University.
  • Shackle, C. 1972. Punjabi. London: English Universities Press.

External links

Wikipedia
Punjabi language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikimedia Incubator
v • d • e
 (Official) Languages of the Republic of India
Federal-level Official languages
State-level official languages

Assamese · Bengali · Bodo · Dogri · Garo · Gujarati · Standard Hindi · Kannada · Kashmiri · Khasi · Kokborok · Konkani · Maithili · Malayalam · Meitei · Marathi · Mizo · Nepali · Oriya · Punjabi · Sanskrit  · Santali · Sindhi · Telugu · Tamil · Urdu
v • d • e
 
Indic (Indo-Aryan)
 
Iranian
Italics indicate extinct languages.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_language"

No comments have been added.



Your name:

City:

Country:

Your comments:

Security check *
(Please enter the number into adjoining box)

 

  • Ads

           
eXTReMe Tracker