Sindhi language, Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 23 million people in Pakistan, mostly living in the southeastern province of Sindh, where it has official status, and in the adjacent Las Bela district of Balochistan. In India, where Sindhi is one of the languages recognized by the constitution, there are some 2.5 million speakers, including both speakers of the Kachchhi dialect living in Kachchh, on the Pakistan frontier, and communities descended from Sindhi-speaking immigrants who had left Pakistan in 1947–48 and who are mostly settled in Gujarat and Maharashtra states. There are also smaller overseas groups in North America, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Characteristics
As a result of the historically isolated situation of Sindh in the lower Indus valley, Sindhi is distinguished within Indo-Aryan by many linguistic features of its own. Its closest relative is Siraiki, with which it shares the four distinctive implosive consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/, which are pronounced with indrawn breath and contrast phonemically with the usual /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/. Sindhi also preserves the old short final vowels lost in most other Indo-Aryan languages—e.g., gharu ‘house,’ ghara ‘houses,’ versus Siraiki (and Urdu) ghar ‘house, houses.’ Sindhi is further distinguished by numerous items of vocabulary and by many complexities in its grammatical system, such as a large number of irregular past participles—e.g., ditho ‘saw’ from disanu ‘to see,’ muo ‘died’ from maranu ‘to die’—and the use of suffixed pronouns, as in atha-mi ‘is mine,’ atha-si ‘is his.’