Punjabi language, Punjabi also spelled Panjabi, one of the most widely spoken Indo-Aryan languages. The old British spelling “Punjabi” remains in more common general usage than the academically precise “Panjabi.” In the early 21st century there were about 30 million speakers of Punjabi in India. It is the official language of the Indian state of Punjab and is one of the languages recognized by the Indian constitution. In Pakistan Punjabi is spoken by some 70 million speakers, mostly in Punjab province, but official status at both the national and the provincial level is reserved for Urdu. There are also important overseas communities of Punjabi speakers, particularly in Canada and the United Kingdom—where in the early 21st century they respectively constituted the third and fourth largest linguistic groups in the national populations—as well as in several parts of the United States.
Scripts
In India, Punjabi is written in the distinctive Gurmukhi script, which is particularly associated with the Sikhs. That script is a member of the Indic family of scripts, written from left to right, but in its organization it differs significantly from the Devanagari used to write Hindi. The Urdu script, written from right to left, is used for writing Punjabi in Pakistan, where it is nowadays often given the imitative name Shahmukhi. Punjabi is thus today one of the very few languages in the world to be written in two quite different and mutually unintelligible scripts.
Standardization
In spite of Punjabi’s very large numbers of speakers and rich traditions of popular poetry, the standardization of the language was historically inhibited by lack of official recognition as well as by the different cultural preferences of the three main local religious communities of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. Other languages were cultivated for most kinds of writing, including Persian under the Mughal Empire, then Urdu during the British period and, in Pakistan, continuing to the present day. In most other Indo-Aryan-speaking areas of South Asia, the modern period saw overlapping local dialects being grouped into strictly defined provincial languages, but this process has taken much longer to happen in Punjab.