Punjabi Language

Punjabi Language, or Panjabi, official language of the Indian state of Punjab. It has around 27.1 million speakers in India. It is much more widely spoken in Pakistan, where it is the most important language in terms of numbers (more than 60.6 million).

Despite these apparently precise figures, it is difficult to distinguish Punjabi from a number of other languages or dialects that form a continuous chain straddling the border between India and Pakistan. For instance, the variety spoken in Pakistan, referred to as Lahnda or Western Punjabi, is widely regarded as a separate language. The dialect spoken in Amritsar and Lahore from the Indian variety of Punjabi, referred to as Gurmukhi or Eastern Punjabi, forms the basis of literary Punjabi.

Punjabi is uniquely associated with the Sikh religion; the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, was written in that language. Its distinctive script, Gurmukhi (“from the guru’s mouth”), was invented by a Sikh guru. The Gurmukhi script, or syllabary, was devised along the lines of Devanagari as used in other Indo-Aryan languages.

Punjabi differs from its closest relatives in having a marked tone system; three different tones are indicated in the script. It has two grammatical genders, and a system of postpositions rather than case markings. Although it is very widely spoken, in recent decades Punjabi has been losing ground as a written language to Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.