Lahnda

About: the linguistic grouping of Punjabi’s western varieties

For other uses, see Western Punjabi (disambiguation).

Lahnda (Template:Langx, Template:IPA, Template:Lit),Template:Efn also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi,Template:Efn is a group of Punjabi language varieties within the north-western branch of the Indo-Aryan language family, spoken in the Punjab, Hazara, and Azad Kashmir regions of Pakistan. It is defined in the ISO 639 standard as a "macrolanguage" or as a "series of dialects" by other authors.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Its validity as a linguistic genetic grouping is not certain.Template:Sfn The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves, who refer to their respective dialects or simply the language "Punjabi".Template:Sfn

Lahnda includes the following dialects: Saraiki (spoken mostly in southern Pakistani Punjab by about 26 million people); the Jatki dialects (simply referred to as "Punjabi" by their ~50 million speakers, spoken in the Bar region of Central Punjab) i.e. Jhangvi, Shahpuri and Dhanni; the diverse varieties of Hindko (with almost five million speakers in north-western Punjab and neighbouring regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Hazara); Pahari/Pothwari (with 3.5 million speakers predominantly on the Pothohar Plateau of northern Punjab, as well as Azad Kashmir and parts of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir); Khetrani (transitional with Sindhi, 20,000 speakers in Balochistan); and Inku (a possibly extinct language of Afghanistan). Ethnologue also subsumes under Lahnda a group of varieties that it labels as "Western Punjabi" (ISO 639-3 code: pnb) – the Majhi dialects transitional between Lahnda and Eastern Punjabi; these are spoken by about 66 million people.Template:Sfn Glottolog, however, regards only the Shahpuri, Dhanni and Jatki dialects as "Western Punjabi" within the "Greater Panjabic" family, distinguishing it from the Lahnda varieties ("Hindko-Siraiki" and "Paharic").

Name

Lahnda means "western" in Punjabi. It was coined by William St. Clair Tisdall (in the form Lahindā) probably around 1890 and later adopted by a number of linguists — notably George Abraham Grierson — for a dialect group that had no general local name.Template:Rp This term has currency only among linguists.Template:Sfn

Development

Baba Farid (c. 1188–1266), a celebrated and revered Punjabi Sufi saint of the 12th century, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect.

Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (c. 1830 – 1907) is another Punjabi poet who composed poetry in a mixture of both the Eastern and Lahnda varieties of Punjabi.

Saraiki (in the south) and Hindko (in the northwest) have been cultivated as literary standards. The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki speakers since 1981, and Hindko speakers from 2017, prior to which both were represented by Punjabi in general.Template:Sfn

Classification

Lahnda has several traits that distinguish it from other Punjabi linguistic groups, such as a future tense in -s-. Like Sindhi, Saraiki retains breathy-voiced consonants, has developed implosives, and lacks tone. Hindko, also called Panjistani or (ambiguously) Pahari, is more like Central Punjabi in this regard, though the equivalent of the low-rising tone of Central Punjabi is a high-falling tone in Peshawar Hindko.

File:Linguistic map of India, showing the areas where Indo-Aryan languages are spoken, published in the 'Imperial Gazetteer of India' (Vol. XXVI, Atlas; 1931 revised edition; plate no. 13).jpg

Lahnda depicted on a linguistic map of India, showing the areas where Indo-Aryan languages are spoken, published in the 'Imperial Gazetteer of India' (Vol. XXVI, Atlas; 1931 revised edition; plate no. 13).

Sindhi and Punjabi groups (including Lahnda) form a dialect continuum with no clear-cut boundaries. Ethnologue classifies the western forms of Central Punjabi and the dialects transitional between Lahnda and Central Punjabi as Lahnda, so that the Lahnda–Eastern Punjabi isogloss approximates the Pakistani–Indian border.

Script

Lahndi-speaking Sikhs employ the Gurmukhi script for recording the language rather than the Perso-Arabic-based Shahmukhi script.

Bibliography

• Saraiki political movement: its impact in south Punjab. Journal of Research (Humanities)({Template:Year). (This PDF contains multiple articles from the same issue.)
• The Indo-Aryan languages{{#if:Masica|, Masica}. Cambridge University Press(1991). ISBN 978-0-521-23420-7
• Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan. Asian Survey({Template:Year).
• Siraiki: A Language Movement in Pakistan. Modern Asian Studies({Template:Date).
• Problems of classification in Pakistan Panjab. Transactions of the Philological Society({Template:Date).

Further reading

• Linguistic Atlas Of The Punjab{{#if:Singh Gill|, Singh Gill}. Department of Anthropological Linguistics, Punjabi University, Patiala(1973)
• ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਭਾਸ਼ਾ ਦਾ ਵਿਆਕਰਣ{{#if:Chandra|, Chandra}. Publication Bureau, Panjab University, Chandigarh(1964)
• Panjabi: A Comprehensive Grammar{{#if:Bhardwaj|, Bhardwaj}. Routledge(2016). ISBN 978-1-315-76080-3
• A comparative study of acoustic cues of Punjabi velar plosives in Majhi and Lehandi. Hamdard Islamicus({Template:Year).
• Phonation differences in the stop laryngeal contrasts of Jangli (Indo-Aryan). (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages({Template:Year).
• Phonemic Inventory of Punjabi. Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing({Template:Year).
• Segmental study of Punjabi glottal fricative /H/. Competitive Linguistic Research Journal({Template:Year).

External links

• Map of Lahnda dialects from Grierson's early 20th-century Linguistic Survey of India