Lahnda

Lahnda (/ˈlɑːndə/;[1] لہندا), also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi,[2] 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"[3] or as a "series of dialects" by other authors.[4][lower-alpha 1] Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain.[5] The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves.[4]

For the scripts, see Laṇḍā scripts.

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

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 the Pothohar region of Punjab, Azad Kashmir and parts of Indian Jammu and Kashmir), Khetrani (20,000 speakers in Balochistan), and Inku (a possibly extinct language of Afghanistan). 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.[3][6]

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.[7]: 883  This term has currency only among linguists.[5]

Development

Baba Farid (c. 1188–1266), a celebrated and revered Sufi saint of the Punjab, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect.[8] Saraiki and Hindko have been cultivated as literary languages.[9] The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s.[10][11] The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki speakers since 1981, and Hindko speakers from 2017, prior to which both were represented by Punjabi.[12]

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.[13]

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.[9]

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.[14]

Script

Lahndi-speaking Sikhs employ the Gurmukhi script for recording the language rather than the Perso-Arabic-based Shahmukhi script.[15]

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. Zograph, G. A. (2023). "Chapter 3". Languages of South Asia: A Guide (Reprint ed.). Taylor & Francis. p. 52. ISBN 9781000831597. LAHNDA – Lahnda (Lahndi) or Western Panjabi is the name given to a group of dialects spread over the northern half of Pakistan. In the north, they come into contact with the Dardic languages with which they share some common features, In the east, they turn gradually into Panjabi, and in the south into Sindhi. In the south-east there is a clearly defined boundary between Lahnda and Rajasthani, and in the west a similarly well-marked boundary between it and the Iranian languages Baluchi and Pushtu. The number of people speaking Lahnda can only be guessed at: it is probably in excess of 20 million.
  3. Lahnda at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023) closed access
  4. Masica 1991, pp. 17–18.
  5. Masica 1991, p. 18.
  6. Shackle 1979, p. 198.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Shackle, Christopher (2010). "Lahnda". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Oxford: Elsevier. p. 635. ISBN 9780080877754.
  10. Rahman 1997, p. 838.
  11. Shackle 1977.
  12. Javaid 2004, p. 46.
  13. "Mian Muhammad Bakhsh – A great Punjabi Sufi Poet". 22 March 2019. Archived from the original on 22 March 2019. Retrieved 3 May 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  14. Lahnda at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  15. Smirnov, Yuri Andreyevich (1975). The Lahndi Language. Nauka Publishing House, Central Department of Oriental Literature. p. 28. Lahndi-speaking Sikhs frequently use the Gurmukhi alphabet to write texts in the language.

Bibliography

Further reading
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