Lahnda
Group of Indo-Aryan language varieties
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Through Pakistan
Lahnda includes the following language varieties: Saraiki (spoken mostly in southern Pakistani Punjab by about 26 million people); the Jatki Punjabi dialects (spoken by ~40 million people across the Bar region of western Punjab); the diverse varieties of Hindko (with almost five million speakers in north-western Punjab and neighbouring regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Hazara); Pahari/Pothwari (with 3.5 million speakers predominantly on the Pothohar Plateau of northern Punjab, as well as Azad Kashmir and parts of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir); Khetrani (transitional with Sindhi, 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. Glottolog, however, regards only the Shahpuri, Dhanni and Jatki dialects as "Western Punjabi" within the "Greater Panjabic" family, distinguishing it from the Lahnda language varieties ("Hindko-Siraiki" and "Paharic").
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. This term has currency only among linguists.
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Development
Baba Farid (c. 1188–1266), a celebrated and revered Punjabi Sufi saint of the 12th century, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect.
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.
Saraiki (in the south) and Hindko (in the northwest) have been cultivated as literary standards. The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s. The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki speakers since 1981, and Hindko speakers from 2017, prior to which both were represented by Punjabi in general.
Classification
Lahnda has several traits that distinguish it from other Punjabi linguistic groups, such as a future tense in -s-. Like Sindhi, Saraiki retains breathy-voiced consonants, has developed implosives, and lacks tone. Hindko, also called Panjistani or (ambiguously) Pahari, is more like Central Punjabi in this regard, though the equivalent of the low-rising tone of Central Punjabi is a high-falling tone in Peshawar Hindko.
Sindhi and Punjabi groups (including Lahnda) form a dialect continuum with no clear-cut boundaries. Ethnologue classifies the western forms of Central Punjabi and the dialects transitional between Lahnda and Central Punjabi as Lahnda, so that the Lahnda–Eastern Punjabi isogloss approximates the Pakistani–Indian border.
Script
Lahndi-speaking Sikhs employ the Gurmukhi script for recording the language rather than the Perso-Arabic-based Shahmukhi script.