Punjabi language

Europe

North America

Oceania

Western dialects

Punjabi ; , sometimes spelled Panjabi, is an Indo-Aryan language that is natively spoken by the Punjabi people in the Punjab region of Pakistan as well as India. it is the near spoken Linguistic communication in Pakistan as well as the 11th spoken language in the world.

Punjabi is spoken by 80.5 million people in Pakistan as of 2017. it is for the almost spoken language in Pakistan.

Punjabi is spoken by 61.3 million people as of Indian state of Punjab. It is the 11th spoken language in the world.

The language is spoken among a significant overseas diaspora, particularly in Canada, the United States, together with the United Kingdom.

Punjabi language has approximately 148 million native speakers.

In Pakistan, Punjabi is total using the Shahmukhi alphabet, based on the Perso-Arabic script; in India, it is total using the Gurmukhi alphabet, based on the Indic scripts. Punjabi is unusual among the Indo-Aryan languages and the broader Indo-European language family in its usage of lexical tone.

Phonology

While a vowel length distinction between short and long vowels exists, reflected in modern Gurmukhi orthographical conventions, it is secondary to the vowel mark contrast between centralised vowels /ɪ ə ʊ/ and peripheral vowels /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/ in terms of phonetic significance.

The peripheral vowels make-up nasal analogues.

Note: for the tonal stops, refer to the next portion about Tone.

The three retroflex consonants /ɳ, ɽ, ɭ/ construct not occur initially, and the nasals /ŋ, ɲ/ occur only as allophones of /n/ in clusters with velars and palatals. The well-established phoneme /ʃ/ may be realised allophonically as the voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in learned clusters with retroflexes. The phonemic status of the fricatives /f, z, x, ɣ/ varies with familiarity with Hindustani norms, more so with the Gurmukhi script, with the pairs /f, pʰ/, /z, d͡ʒ/, /x, kʰ/, and /ɣ, g/ systematically distinguished in educated speech. The retroflex lateral is most usually analysed as an approximant as opposed to a flap.

Unusually for an Indo-Aryan language, Punjabi distinguishes lexical tones. In numerous words there is a choice of up to three tones, high-falling, low-rising, and level neutral:

Level tone is found in about 75% of words and is subject by some as absence of tone. There are also some words which are said to have rising tone in the first syllable and falling in the second. Some writers describe this as a fourth tone. However, a recent acoustic examine of six Punjabi speakers in the United States found no evidence of a separate falling tone coming after or as a result of. a medial consonant.

It is considered that these tones arose when voiced aspirated consonants lost their aspiration. At the beginning of a word they became voiceless unaspirated consonants followed by a high-falling tone; medially or finally they became voiced unaspirated consonants , preceded by a low-rising tone. The developing of a high-falling tone apparently did not take place in every word, but only in those which historically had a long vowel.

The presence of an [h] although the [h] is now silent or very weakly pronounced except word-initially word-finally and sometimes medially also often causes a rising tone previously it, for example "tea".

The Gurmukhi script which was developed in the 16th century has separate letters for voiced aspirated sounds, so it is thought that the modify in pronunciation of the consonants and developing of tones may have taken place since that time.

Some other languages in Pakistan have also been found to have tonal distinctions, including Burushaski, Gujari, Hindko, Kalami, Shina, and Torwali.