Lahnda


Lahnda also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi, is a group of north-western Indo-Aryan language varieties spoken in Pakistani Punjab and in parts of the neighbouring Azad Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These terms are exonyms and are not used by the speakers themselves. The emerging languages of this dialect area are Saraiki, Hindko and Pothohari.
The validity of Lahnda as a genetic grouping has not been established.

Name

Lahnda means "western" in Punjabi. It was coined by William St. Clair Tisdall 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.

Varieties

Below is a list of the varieties of Lahnda:
Within Lahnda, Ethnologue also includes what it labels as "Western Punjabi" – the Majhi dialects transitional between Lahnda and Eastern Punjabi; these are spoken by about 62 million people.
Recently, Saraiki and Hindko are being cultivated as literary languages. The development of the standard written Saraiki began in the 1960s. The national census of Pakistan has counted Saraiki and Hindko speakers since 1981.
Lahnda has several traits that distinguish it from Punjabi, such as a future tense in -s-. Like Sindhi, Siraiki retains breathy-voiced consonants, has developed implosives, and lacks tone. Hindko, also called Panjistani or Pahari, is more like Punjabi in this regard, though the equivalent of the low-rising tone of Punjabi is a high-falling tone in Peshawar Hindko.
Sindhi, Lahnda, Punjabi, and Western Pahari form a dialect continuum with no clear-cut boundaries. Ethnologue classifies the western dialects of Punjabi as Lahnda, so that the Lahnda–Punjabi isogloss approximates the Pakistani–Indian border.