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Lahnda

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by EstablishmentOfKnowledge (talk | contribs) at 23:40, 3 May 2023 (Hindko was added to the census in 2017. Only Saraiki was added in 1981). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For the scripts, see Laṇḍā scripts.

Lahnda
RegionWestern Punjab region
Perso-Arabic
(Shahmukhi alphabet)
Language codes
ISO 639-2lah
ISO 639-3lah

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 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 speakers since 1981, and Hindko speakers from 2017, prior to which both were represented by Punjabi.[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

  1. ^ 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

  1. ^ "Lahnda". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  2. ^ a b Lahnda at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023) Closed access icon
  3. ^ a b Masica 1991, pp. 17–18.
  4. ^ a b Masica 1991, p. 18.
  5. ^ Shackle 1979, p. 198.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Rahman 1997, p. 838.
  10. ^ Shackle 1977.
  11. ^ Javaid 2004, p. 46.
  12. ^ Lahnda at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

Bibliography

Further reading

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