Lahnda
| Lahnda | |
|---|---|
| Region | Western Punjab region |
| Perso-Arabic (Shahmukhi alphabet) | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | lah |
| ISO 639-3 | lah |
Lahnda (/ˈlɑːndə/;[1] لہندا), also known as Lahndi 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 standard as a "macrolanguage"[2] or as a "series of dialects" by other authors.[3][a] Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain.[4] The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves.[3]
Lahnda includes the following languages: Saraiki (spoken mostly in southern Pakistani Punjab by about 26 million people), the diverse varieties of Hindko (with almost five million speakers in north-western Punjab and neighbouring regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Hazara), Pahari/Pothwari (3.5 million speakers in north-central Punjab, Azad Kashmir and parts of Indian Jammu and Kashmir), Khetrani (20,000 speakers in Balochistan), and Inku (a possibly extinct language of Afghanistan).[citation needed] 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.[2][5]
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.[6]: 883 This term has currency only among linguists.[4]
Development
Baba Farid (c. 1188–1266), a celebrated and revered Sufi saint of the Punjab, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect.[7] Saraiki Pahari-Pothwari (or Panjistani) and Hindko have been cultivated as literary languages.[8] The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s.[9][10] The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki Pahari-Pothwari (Panjistani) and Hindko speakers since 2023.[11]
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.[8]
Sindhi, Lahnda and Punjabi form a dialect continuum with no clear-cut boundaries. Ethnologue classifies the western dialects of Punjabi as Lahnda, so that the Lahnda–Punjabi isogloss approximates the Pakistani–Indian border.[12]
Notes
- ^ For the difficulties in assigning the labels "language" and "dialect", see Shackle (1979) for Punjabi and Masica (1991, pp. 23–27) for Indo-Aryan generally.
References
- ^ "Lahnda". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ a b Lahnda at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023)
- ^ a b Masica 1991, pp. 17–18.
- ^ a b Masica 1991, p. 18.
- ^ Shackle 1979, p. 198.
- ^ Grierson, George A. (1930). "Lahndā and Lahndī". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 5 (4): 883–887. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00090571. S2CID 160784067.
- ^ Johar, Surinder Singh (1999). Guru Gobind Singh : a multi-faceted personality. New Delhi: M.D. Publications. p. 56. ISBN 81-7533-093-7. OCLC 52865201.
- ^ a b Shackle, Christopher (2010). "Lahnda". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Oxford: Elsevier. p. 635. ISBN 9780080877754.
- ^ Rahman 1997, p. 838.
- ^ Shackle 1977.
- ^ Javaid 2004, p. 46.
- ^ Lahnda at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Bibliography
- Javaid, Umbreen (2004). "Saraiki political movement: its impact in south Punjab" (PDF). Journal of Research (Humanities). 40 (2). Lahore: Department of English Language & Literature, University of the Punjab: 45–55. (This PDF contains multiple articles from the same issue.)
- Masica, Colin P. (1991). The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23420-7.
- Rahman, Tariq (1997). "Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan". Asian Survey. 37 (9): 833–839. doi:10.2307/2645700. JSTOR 2645700.
- Shackle, Christopher (1977). "Siraiki: A Language Movement in Pakistan". Modern Asian Studies. 11 (3): 379–403. doi:10.1017/s0026749x00014190. ISSN 0026-749X. JSTOR 311504. S2CID 144829301.
- Shackle, Christopher (1979). "Problems of classification in Pakistan Panjab". Transactions of the Philological Society. 77 (1): 191–210. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1979.tb00857.x. ISSN 0079-1636.
Further reading
- Singh Gill, Harjeet (1973). Linguistic Atlas Of The Punjab. Department of Anthropological Linguistics, Punjabi University, Patiala. p. 205.
- Chandra, Duni (1964). ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਭਾਸ਼ਾ ਦਾ ਵਿਆਕਰਣ. Publication Bureau, Panjab University, Chandigarh. p. 290.
- Bhardwaj, Mangat Rai (2016). Panjabi: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. p. 487. ISBN 978-1-315-76080-3.
- Malik, Moazzam Ali; Abbas, Furrakh; Noreen, Khadija (2020). "A comparative study of acoustic cues of Punjabi velar plosives in Majhi and Lehandi". Hamdard Islamicus. 43 (2): 1564–1571.
- Hussain, Qandeel (2022). "Phonation differences in the stop laryngeal contrasts of Jangli (Indo-Aryan)". (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages. 1 (1).
- Karamat, Nayyara (2001). "Phonemic Inventory of Punjabi". Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing: 179–188. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.695.1248.
- Malik, Moazzam Ali; Kokub, Iqra (2020). "Segmental study of Punjabi glottal fricative /H/". Competitive Linguistic Research Journal. 2 (1): 1–17.
External links
- Map of Lahnda dialects from Grierson's early 20th-century Linguistic Survey of India
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