Punjabi language

Punjabi (sometimes spelled Panjabi) is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Punjabi people native to the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. With over 156 million speakers across all its varieties, it is the seventh most spoken native language and the twelfth most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world.

Punjabi is the most widely-spoken native language in Pakistan, with 123.2 million speakers across all its language varieties, according to the 2023 census; and the 11th most widely-spoken in India, with 31.1 million native speakers, according to the 2011 census; making it the third most spoken native language in South Asia (after Hindi and Bengali). It is also spoken among a significant overseas diaspora, particularly in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, the Gulf states, and Southeast Asia.

Being classified under the Northwestern branch of the Indo-Aryan languages, Punjabi is most closely related to Sindhi. It is the only Indo-Aryan language thought to have descended from more than one Prakrit, which gradually developed into . The language's earliest writings can be traced to the Nath jogis of the Pothohar Plateau from the 9th century. It further developed during the Islamic period in South Asia, undergoing lexical expansion from Arabic and Persian influence; and raising poets like Baba Farid. Middle Punjabi produced the great literary works of Punjabi folklore, alongside strengthening the Islamic mystic literary tradition, and playing a vital role in the development of Sant Bhasha, the language of the Guru Granth Sahib – the holiest book in Sikhism. Modern Punjabi arose in the colonial era out of Early Modern Punjabi, which helped establish a literary standard spread widely by poets including Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah among many.

Being a diagraphic language, it is written using two standard scripts: Shahmukhi, based on the Perso-Arabic script, in Pakistan; and Gurmukhi, based on the Indic scripts, in India. Punjabi is an inflected language, with six cases for noun, three for personal pronoun, five for third-person pronoun; two genders (masculine, feminine); and two numbers (singular, plural). It is also a tonal language – specifically employing lexical tone – which makes it unusual among the Indo-Aryan languages and its broader Indo-European language family where tonalisation is not common. The base of its vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit in the form of Prakrit, while a significant portion of its high-register speech is derived from Persian and Arabic, along with a number of recent loanwords borrowed from English and Portuguese among other European languages. It has also had minor influence from and on neighbouring languages such as Sindhi, Hindi–Urdu, Pashto, Dogri, and Kashmiri.

Punjabi has many dialects spread throughout the Punjab region and its surroundings, which are grouped into two main categories – Eastern Punjabi and Western Punjabi; with the Majhi dialect (Central Punjabi) being intermediate between both and forming the basis of Standard Punjabi in both Pakistan and India. It is the official language in the Indian state of Punjab, and carries nominal provincial status in the Pakistani province of Punjab.