Punjabi

Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language used on both sides of the India–Pakistan border, especially in India’s Punjab state and Pakistan’s Punjab province. Migration has also established Punjabi-speaking communities in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and other places. Its geography extends beyond a single state, religion or writing system.

Regional names need careful reading

The region’s linguistic boundaries cannot be reduced to an eastern half and a western half. Historical classifications have used Lahnda, or Western Punjabi, in ways that are disputed. In a 1977 study, Christopher Shackle documented objections both from Punjabi advocates who rejected dividing Punjabi and from Saraiki advocates who rejected treating their language as a subordinate Punjabi dialect.

A later phonetic study by Firdos Atta, Jeroen van de Weijer and Lei Zhu treats Saraiki as a language in its own right and discusses the history of those classifications. Consequently, a source’s use of Western Punjabi needs to be checked, rather than assumed to mean simply all Punjabi spoken in Pakistan. Punjab’s geographical extent and Punjabi’s linguistic scope are different questions.

Literature across two main scripts

Punjabi’s two principal writing traditions are Gurmukhi, widely used in Indian Punjab, and Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script widely used in Pakistani Punjab. Both also circulate through diaspora communities. These are writing systems for Punjabi, not two languages created by their different-looking letters. Anne Murphy’s research locates their histories in early modern manuscripts as well as later print.

Her account describes how established narrative forms, including the qissā, continued through print in both scripts, alongside religious, practical and modern literary writing. The 1947 partition of Punjab strengthened divisions between the two literary worlds. That history helps explain present reading barriers, while showing why a script should not be treated as a complete description of a reader’s identity.

One concrete response appears in the public introduction to the literary magazine Sanjh. It describes matching contents issued from Lahore in Shahmukhi and from Ludhiana in Gurmukhi, enabling readers of either script to encounter the same writing. The publication’s stated method makes access across scripts an editorial task. It does not require every reader to master both systems before taking part in a shared literary conversation.

Speech requires more than a change of alphabet

Writing is only one part of learning the language. A Reference Grammar of Punjabi, by Harjeet Singh Gill and Henry A. Gleason Jr., is available through Punjabi University in a 2013 edition revised by Mukhtiar Singh Gill. Its account includes contrastive tone: differences in pitch pattern can distinguish words. Its pronunciation discussion explicitly identifies standard Majhi as a reference and also notes regional variation.

That qualification is useful. A reference description provides a consistent starting point; it does not make every family’s pronunciation identical. Tone also means that replacing letters with an English spelling cannot by itself teach the distinctions a learner needs to hear.

Digital tools and community memory

Punjabi University in Patiala maintains an online resource directory listing a Gurmukhi–Shahmukhi–English dictionary, learning materials, script-conversion systems and tools for typing and grammatical analysis. Transliteration and translation have separate roles here: changing the script of Punjabi writing is a different operation from translating its meaning into another language. These resources address practical access to written Punjabi, alongside teaching and linguistic research.

Documentation also follows the lives of people who sustain the language. The University of British Columbia’s Punjabi in BC project, identified as a 2019–2023 initiative, records language advocacy in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Students and recent graduates conducted or edited interviews with teachers, advocates, writers and journalists. Its project account describes a shift from an initial emphasis on teaching and advocacy to wider literary and media work.

This kind of archive complements a grammar or dictionary. It records how education, publishing and individual commitments give Punjabi a continuing place in a community. A language’s documentation can therefore include both the structure of its words and the experiences of people who make space for using them.