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Lahnda (; , ), also known as Lahndi (Lahanda, Lahinda) or Western Punjabi, is a group of north-western Indo-Aryan language varieties spoken in parts of Pakistan and India. It is defined in the
ISO 639 ISO 639 is a international standard, standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) concerned with representation of languages and language groups. It currently consists of four sets (1-3, 5) of code, named after each part w ...
standard as a " macrolanguage" or as a "series of dialects" by other authors. Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain. The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are
exonyms An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...
employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves. Lahnda includes the following dialects: Saraiki (spoken mostly in southern Pakistani Punjab by about 26 million people), the Jatki dialects (referred to as Punjabi by their ~50 million speakers, spoken in the Bar region of Punjab) i.e. Jhangvi, Shahpuri and Dhanni, the diverse varieties of
Hindko Hindko (, , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken by several million people of various ethnic backgrounds in northwestern Pakistan, primarily in the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Pun ...
(with almost five million speakers in north-western Punjab and neighbouring regions of
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (; ; , ; abbr. KP or KPK), formerly known as the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is a Administrative units of Pakistan, province of Pakistan. Located in the Northern Pakistan, northwestern region of the country, Khyber ...
, especially Hazara), Pahari/Pothwari (3.5 million speakers in the Pothohar region of Punjab,
Azad Kashmir Azad Jammu and Kashmir (), abbreviated as AJK and colloquially referred to as simply Azad Kashmir ( ), is a region administered by Pakistan as a nominally self-governing entitySee: * * * and constituting the western portion of the larger ...
and parts of Indian Jammu and Kashmir), Khetrani (20,000 speakers in
Balochistan Balochistan ( ; , ), also spelled as Baluchistan or Baluchestan, is a historical region in West and South Asia, located in the Iranian plateau's far southeast and bordering the Indian Plate and the Arabian Sea coastline. This arid region o ...
), and Inku (a possibly extinct language of Afghanistan). ''
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...
'' also subsumes under Lahnda a group of varieties that it labels as "Western Punjabi" (
ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...
code: ''pnb'') – the Majhi dialects transitional between Lahnda and Eastern Punjabi; these are spoken by about 66 million people. ''
Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...
'', 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. This term has currency only among linguists.


Development

Baba Farid Farīduddīn Masūd Ganjshakar ( – 16 Oct 1265), commonly known as Bābā Farīd or Sheikh Farīd (also in Anglicised spelling Fareed, Fareed ud-Deen, Masood, etc.), was a 13th-century Punjabi Muslim mystic, poet and preacher. Revered by ...
(c. 1188–1266), a celebrated and revered Sufi saint of the Punjab, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect. Saraiki and Hindko have been cultivated as literary languages. The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s. The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki speakers since 1981, and Hindko speakers from 2017, prior to which both were represented by Punjabi. 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.


Classification

Lahnda has several traits that distinguish it from Punjabi, such as a future tense in ''-s-''. Like Sindhi, Siraiki retains breathy-voiced consonants, has developed implosives, and lacks tone. Hindko, also called ''Panjistani'' or (ambiguously) ''Pahari'', is more like Punjabi in this regard, though the equivalent of the low-rising tone of Punjabi is a high-falling tone in Peshawar Hindko. Sindhi, Lahnda and Punjabi form a
dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...
with no clear-cut boundaries. ''
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...
'' classifies the western dialects of Punjabi as Lahnda, so that the Lahnda–Punjabi isogloss approximates the Pakistani–Indian border.


Script

Lahndi-speaking
Sikhs Sikhs (singular Sikh: or ; , ) are an ethnoreligious group who adhere to Sikhism, a religion that originated in the late 15th century in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, based on the revelation of Guru Nanak. The term ''Sikh'' ...
employ the
Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official scrip ...
script for recording the language rather than the Perso-Arabic-based
Shahmukhi Shahmukhi (, , , ) is the right-to-left abjad-based script developed from the Perso-Arabic alphabet used for the Punjabi language varieties, predominantly in Punjab, Pakistan. It is generally written in the Nastaʿlīq calligraphic hand, whic ...
script.


Notes


References


Bibliography

* (This PDF contains multiple articles from the same issue.) * * * *


Further reading

* * * * * * *


External links


Map of Lahnda dialects
from Grierson's early 20th-century
Linguistic Survey of India The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a lingu ...
{{Authority control Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages Punjabi dialects Punjabi language in Pakistan