Lahnda
Lahnda, also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi, is a group of north-western Indo-Aryan language varieties spoken in northern and central parts of Pakistan. It is defined in the ISO 639 standard as a "macrolanguage" or as a "series of dialects" by other authors. Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain. The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves, who refer to their dialects.
Lahnda includes the following dialects: Saraiki, the Jatki dialects i.e. Jhangvi, Shahpuri and Dhanni, the diverse varieties of Hindko, Pahari/Pothwari, Khetrani, and Inku. Ethnologue also subsumes under Lahnda a group of varieties that it labels as "Western Punjabi" – 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 varieties.
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.Development
, a celebrated and revered Sufi saint of the Punjab, composed poetry in the Lahnda lect. Saraiki and Hindko have been cultivated as literary languages. 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.Mian Muhammad Bakhsh is another Punjabi poet who composed poetry in a mixture of both the Eastern and Lahnda varieties of Punjabi.
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 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 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.